We'll Be Back after These Loud Messages

Canada seems to be following the U.S.'s lead on regulating the loudness of TV commercials. But is it all just a smokescreen?

In a world that has become hyper-accelerated, media rich, and networked, the impact of technology on our daily lives is more profound than ever before. Imagine a typical Canadian household, in which the following scenario might unfold: Mom watches some fast-paced reality-television show while Dad sits on a nearby chair and cruises the internet on his laptop computer. Junior is plugged into an iPod that is blasting some rhythmically dense music while he updates his Facebook profile. Meanwhile, his sister works through her homework assignment on a third computer. But then a commercial comes on, and this artificial equilibrium is thrown asunder as the volume instantly increases. Fingers race to the remote control to turn the volume down, but it’s too late. Dad’s temper flares, and the kids cover their ears in protest of this change in environmental conditions. This is a perfect example of what, in a 2005 article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, Ron Chepesiuk calls “decibel hell.” Sadly, it is also a reflection of how our technologically mediated lives are playing out.

In 2003, Brian Moore and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge published a study focusing on the question “Why are commercials so loud?” The study revealed that a technique known as “fast-acting amplitude compression” is often applied to commercials in order to permit their sound levels to increase without exceeding a set peak-level. By adjusting the level of compression, broadcasters can exploit differences between compressed and uncompressed sounds so that the overall volume can change by three to six decibels.

Other studies have shown that people perceive commercials to be louder because there is less variability of range when it comes to the sound level in a commercial as compared to a non-commercial, and because broadcasters use the top end of that range throughout a commercial. In other words, audio compression and other techniques that are used to reshape sound frequencies have been deliberately developed to capture your attention, and to allow catchy jingles to follow you as you wander away from the television during “commercial breaks.”

What makes this particularly vexing is that the challenge of controlling volume on electronic devices isn’t new. Patents were granted in the 1930s and 1940s to control the amplitude of radio waves, in particular. In 1939, Robert Tahon of France secured a U.S. patent (#2,182,100) for his automatic volume-regulator, which employed a coupling device (located between two valves) to balance the amplitude of sound waves. This idea was enhanced in 1949 when Cornelis Bevoort and Raimond Baudet of the Netherlands secured a U.S. patent (#2,867,688) for a device that regulated speech over telephone lines and radio links by automatically adjusting the strength of a signal to account for variations in equipment and distance.

Clearly, volume control for electronic devices – including television broadcast signals – is technically possible, and has been so for many decades. One could even argue that significant advances in electronic technologies and software should allow broadcasters to generate a perfectly consistent volume control at all times to meet the needs of consumers.