One of my major pet peeves at the moment is bad sound in adverts. As you may or may not know, I do have a bit if a problem with the general shit-ness of most adverts anyway, but this newly developed dislike is quite specific, and to describe it as aptly as possible, I’m afraid I have had to raid the old student text vaults and reference an old friend, Monsieur Michel Chion. To explain precisely my annoyance, I must borrow a word Chion specifically developed in Audio Vision, that of synchresis, meaning ‘the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time’ . Audio synchresis occurs literally all the time - it is essentially the way that audio overdubs, sound effects and the like are synchronised to match our expectations in relation to the visual information on screen. When it works, we don’t notice it; it is a subtle but exact creative process that we tend to only detect when it is done inaccurately. We are perhaps most familiar with a lack of audio synchresis through the cliché of badly dubbed kung-fu movies, but recently it has been creeping in in a covert way to general advertising for main-stream UK companies. There are a few adverts in particular whose audio synchresis is so shoddy it is actually embarrassing that they think such cheap, naive methods will “work” on us.
To demonstrate, there have been two major synchresis perps in the advertising world in recent weeks; PC world and Kingsmill. Let start with Kingsmill. Cast your minds back to the most recent lot of Kingsmill adverts, bizarrely titled “Kingsmill Confessions”. There is one particular advert where a dad and his son return home from football and eat the mum’s sandwich, presumably because they just couldn’t resist shitty old Kingsmill and not ‘cause they were hungry from physical exercise. Over the top of the visuals is an overdubbed narrative-style voice-over of the dad confessing his Kingsmill sins. My major problem with this advert is that the overdubbed voice is that of Timothy Spall. Timothy Spall isn’t actually in the adverts visually, just some specky bald bloke playing the dad. Watching this advert therefore really jarrs any possible naturality and audio-visual synchronisation for me because the bloke on screen is evidently not Timothy Spall, who has a very distinguishable and memorable voice. The lack of synchresis is astounding to me as it is such a simple problem to fix - you just have to make the image match the sound. I don’t give two shits if you have got Timothy bloody Spall as the voice-over and that he is really very bloody good, using his voice doesn’t fucking work within your concept. You need to pick one or the other, otherwise you might as well have a picture of a cat meowing with a dog barking over the top of it. The two entities do not cohere, they do not make sense, and it does not work as a combined effort.
I was further aggravated recently by PC World. Initially, their new series of “My World…” adverts were badly synchronised in a rather subtle form: they had a clip of a curly haired blonde guy talking about his world/pc world which wasn’t quite dubbed properly and was so closed miked that it was as if he was speaking right into your ear. Quite simply, it sounded like it was recorded in a vacuum – unnatural with none of the general sonic ambience necessary for the illusion of audio normality. Whilst this was a bit shit, you could just about excuse it as a post-production error that they couldn’t be arsed to put right. Indeed, they probably realised it didn’t work because their new adverts don’t have any actual people in them at all, usually just pictures of their products. The new adverts don’t really work either though. Like Kingsmill they typically use well know voices, often with serious syncresis problems. Another particular advert from a few weeks ago springs to mind; one of a crazy student with desperately typically messy hair printing a photo of himself after a night at the SU Bar. And the famous voice-over? Why it was only Will from the fucking Inbetweeners! And he has very tidy, sensible hair, thank-you very much. The notion of a typical wanker student returning from a “messy” night at the SU does not fuse with the potent character of Will that so readily jumps to mind when one hear his (again) quite distinctive voice.
For me these errors are really inexcusable. Audio syncresis in some form will have been taught to the people in charge of the sound production on these adverts, so either they are simple charlatans who really aren’t good at their jobs, or the senior copywriter for whatever advert in question just doesn’t give two shits about any kind of vital audio-visual cohesion. I find this very odd (since advertising is a multi-billion pound/dollar industry), why this very noticeable, yet very easy to fix problem is still so prevalent. It happens all the time in adverts, yet it simply wouldn’t be tolerated in films. Fair enough, films are more specifically creative works where such things as syncresis are vital for general plot continuity and audience absorption. But as we are subject to adverts dozens of time everyday, must we have to continually tolerate some complacent, poor quality article masquerading as something worthy of our attention? Sigh. I know there are more important things in the world than this that need sorting, but if people are going to forge a living out of enabling people to flog their stuff, one should at least get the simple stuff right and therefore generally do it properly. Otherwise it’s the creative/audio equivalent of the guy who always fills the same form out wrong or constantly leaves the photocopier jammed. And no one wants to be that guy.
