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| rdfs:comment | - Whenever we hear someone talking through a radio (or any sort of communications device) their voices are always, always slightly distorted so that the audience can tell that the voice is being received through the communications link (as opposed to being spoken by someone who is slightly off-camera). This occurs even on shows where the builders of the communications devices in question achieved faster-than-light space travel hundreds of years ago and who by all rights ought to have come up with a perfect-fidelity microphone/speaker system long ago.
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| abstract | - Whenever we hear someone talking through a radio (or any sort of communications device) their voices are always, always slightly distorted so that the audience can tell that the voice is being received through the communications link (as opposed to being spoken by someone who is slightly off-camera). This occurs even on shows where the builders of the communications devices in question achieved faster-than-light space travel hundreds of years ago and who by all rights ought to have come up with a perfect-fidelity microphone/speaker system long ago. The effect can be accomplished by running the audio through a bandpass filter to remove all frequencies outside a specified range. For example, the U.S. telephone network uses a filter that keeps only frequencies between roughly 300 to 3500 Hz. It's symbolized in comic books by adding a jaggey or "lightning bolt" effect to some part of a speech bubble. Variant: Voice communication over any kind of magical or psychic link (e.g. telepathy) will have a different effect, making the voice sound spooky or echoey instead of metallic, but the trope is the same. This may be simply to serve the Rule of Perception, because otherwise we might get confused as to who's where. It also has a good technical reason: transmitting only 3 kHz worth of audio is far easier than transmitting 20 kHz regardless of what transmission medium or method is being used, and it's OK to do this when the only thing that matters is the speech itself and not so much the audio quality. This may also be explainable in-Verse as a user interface feature; the fictional designers of the fictional system may have felt it was useful to be able to distinguish radio voices from the voices of people present in the room. Goes well with Walkie-Talkie Static. See Also: The Coconut Effect.
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