We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
The sponsor whose commercial can't even be heard, says a specialist in sound, isn't reaching — let alone, creating — customers
for debit decibels?
NBC's Nancy Dickerson, WCBS-TV's Mary Pangalos . . . "penetrating."
CBS' Betty Furness . . . "model of audibility.
,^
I Berry holds, however, that the announcer who talks too fast or ad
: heres to the current fad of "whispering" is doing disservice both to audience and sponsor.
The vocal problem isn't so conspicuous on tv, he continues, "because even when you haven't caught the exact word, you can sometimes 'understand' by watching the announcer's mouth."
The problem is acute with radio, however, especially with car, portable and/ or transistor sets. Most of the latter, for example, cut off below 500 cycles and rarely receive anything above 3500. And even
I with the standard AM receiver, only a really good set is capable of receiving the full range of a station's output.
Moreover, radio-listening has left the relative quiet of the living room and moved into the hullabaloo of beaches, picnics, highways. On a car radio, for example, the announcer's voice has to clear such formidable (and sometimes simultaneous) obstacles as the drone of the engine, the rush of wind, the din of traffic and even fading signal strength.
In fact. Berry points out, a truck's rumble has about the same sound range as the typical announcer's bass voice and therefore "swallows" it.
"Driving back from Pennsylvania recently with the car radio on," he recalls, "I was astonished at the trouble I had just hearing announcers, some of whom are big names in the business as well as good personal friends. But their voices just aren't right for their jobs."
Still another problem, he adds, is that once the average listener has tuned in to a station, he leaves the volume alone, not bothering to turn it up or down with changes in reception. "And why should he?" he wonders. "It's too much to ask — especially of some one driving a car — that he keep changing his radio's volume merely because sound isn't being properly managed from the point of transmission."
Berry evolved his audibility theories during World War II when he served with the Office of War Information (OWI). "One of our problems," he explains, "was to
find ways of countering the Germans' jamming of our broadcasts to Europe. They used everything — bells, dentist drills, buzz saws, industrial noises. ..."
To measure their success, the OWI recorded their broadcasts as received in Europe and analyzed the frequencies of jamming noises to determine what special patterns, if any, they fell into. Not unexpectedly, the jamming ran the full range of audibility, from 50 cycles to 14,000 or 15,000. "Above that," says Berry good naturedly, "it's dog whistle."
While analyzing the OWI records. Berry realized the enormous differences among announcing voices; some penetrated the jamming and got their message through. Others were lost in the uproar. And he soon realized why.
He put his theory to the acid test when, for the succeeding six years, he conducted announcers' auditions for short-wave broadcasts. "Our oscilloscopes soon persuaded us," he confesses, "that if a candidate had one of those deep bass voices that was easy for the
November 9, 1964
39