What Good's the Music If You Can't Hear the Words

Way back in the late 19th Century, the master librettist Sir William S. Gilbert and the wonderful composer Sir Arthur Sullivan combined on a series of 14 operettas, most of them successful and all still frequently performed worldwide.  Of course, their respective roles -- writer and composer -- caused more than their share of tension between them.

In operatic tradition, the libretto was simply a medium for the composer to produce beautiful sung performances.  Sullivan, a protege of Felix Mendelssohn, was firmly in the camp that the music was the primary reason for the composition.  Gilbert, a lawyer and brilliant satirist, wanted his words to be heard and appreciated.  While the survival and thriving of their combined works offers a lasting tribute to the talents of both, their disputes over the relative priority of each others' contributions set the stage for contention in the field, that lasts to this day.

Naturally, this piece has almost nothing whatsoever to do with Gilbert and Sullivan, and everything to do with ... yes, Grey's Anatomy. No, I don't mean the historic textbook used in medical schools, of which I owned a copy while a student at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1973.  I mean the TV show.

Grey's Anatomy, as you surely know even if you've never watched, is a TV drama series set in a hospital in Seattle, with the staff and administration caught up in assorted affairs, marriages and child-producing, same as most medical dramas of the past.  The stories are interesting because medical stories invariably are interesting (hint: it's never lupus).  The dialogue is actually pretty quirky.

At least, the dialogue I can hear.

That's because, like several other shows of which Grey's is a fine example, the producers have apparently a side investment in the music industry.  Accordingly, there is a soundtrack running throughout much of the show, including during the dialogue.

In an effort, we presume, to sell lots of copies of the background music on iTunes, the volume of the background music is turned up to a decibel level comparable to that of the speaker of the dialogue.  This means that the ear of the viewer, which is trying to monitor the dialogue so as to follow the intricacies of the plot, catches many, but not all of the spoken words.  The percentage of words actually heard drops precipitously when the doctors, as they are wont to do, have surgical masks over their faces in the OR and you can't read their lips to help understand them, because the music is too $%@!&* loud.

I'm not young anymore, but my hearing is just fine (I had it checked).  And I'm not alone; just poking around Al Gore's Amazing Internet, I saw pieces (here's one) noting the same problem in passing.  Obviously the FTM principle applies here, and if you simply Follow The Money you can easily see that as long as there is some kind of vested financial relationship between the producers and some part of the music industry, this is not going to change.

But I'm going to go on record here, and let the producers know that watching Grey's Anatomy is far, far more work than it needs to be, and far, far less pleasurable an experience than it could be.  Would that they would simply drag out one of the ubiquitous focus groups, plunk them in a room, and use them to set the levels of the music low enough so that the words could be heard and understood, even behind surgical masks.

Sir William S. Gilbert would be very, very proud.  And I could finally figure out the remaining mysteries of the plot, like who's watching all the children they keep producing, when everyone is operating.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton