In the future, if you laugh while watching a TV show or movie on the Apple TV app, playback may pause. Apple has been granted a patent for “Audience Reactive Media.”
About the patent
The patent relates to digital processing methods for modifying media such as feature films and TV shows. In the patent, Apple notes that in live theater, actors pause for audience laughter to pass. In cinema, such pauses have to be built in by the filmmaker.
Doing so typically requires trial public screenings with test audiences, in order to determine the best timing for holding for laughter (during the film editing phase). In this manner the majority of audiences are covered, in an average way, for comedic effect.
What’s more, directors have observed that comedies are funnier in a live room than in a dead room (or one that is less lively, or more dead, than the live room.) That is because the laughter reaction by a member of the audience, which produces a particular sound power, will cause a higher sound pressure level in a live room than in a dead room.
Over the years, acoustic materials became available such that cinemas could be tuned to have the right amount of reverberation, as speech intelligibility suffers in the presence of too much reverberation while lowering the reverberation time may result in comedies not being perceived as funny.
As film sound tracks became more complex with multichannel audio and competition for dialogue intelligibility from music and sound effects, cinemas trended toward reduced reverberation, in order to promote speech intelligibility and localization of sound events. Surround sound accompanied this development so that if a reverberant listening environment was desired for a scene in a film, recorded reverberation could be added to the multi-channel sound track and in particular to the surround channels.
Apple’s patent is for a method for automatically reacting to an audience’s vocal reaction during movie playback in the Apple TV app.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “A pre-recorded movie is obtained for playback through a display and a speaker. An audience vocal reaction during playback of an original scene in the movie is detected and in response the original scene is lengthened in both picture and sound while playback of the original scene is resumed once the audience vocal reaction has subsided.
“In another aspect, reverberation is generated in response to and based on the vocal reaction then added as audio output through the speaker, but only until the vocal reaction has ended at which point the added reverberation ends. Other aspects are also described and claimed.”
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