Material used in the experiment

5.4.2.1 Questionnaire on expectations of audio description

Participants were asked to complete a multiple- choice questionnaire in order to rank the AD features that, in their opinion, affected quality the most. Given the particular profile of our participants, the questionnaire

80 Emilia Iglesias Fernández et al.

was replaced with a semi- structured interview where questions were read aloud by the researchers. The quality features to be rated were as follows: the length of the AD script (short and concise or longer and more descriptive), the quality of the music soundtrack, the quality of the ambient sound, the quality of special effects, and the quality of the audio describer’s voice. General questions were also put to participants, such as their favourite film genre and their recollections of instances of good and/or bad experiences involving the AD of feature films. Users were also asked to rate the most enhancing and the most irritating features they had personally experienced when listening to AD feature films. We used a five- point Likert scale (one being ‘null effect’ and five being ‘maximum effect’). This information would then be compared with the answers provided to the questions asked after the experiments had been carried out, as explained below. Socio- personal data was also elicited regarding the participants’ age, sex, background education and their previous exposure to AD in feature films.

5.4.2.2 Audio described material

The chosen material was the feature film The Hours. The dramatic and foreboding atmosphere of the film was considered to make it suitable material on which to test our hypothesis that congruent aural stimuli could contribute to an enhanced experience of an AD film and perhaps to a better understanding of the plot. We selected the opening scene (minutes 00: 57– 03:47) because of its high visual input and emotional load. The excerpt was also chosen because two of the aural stimuli, namely the music score and ambient sound, were congruent with the character’s emotional state, as we believed that these would enhance the narration. The scene chosen was set in the 1940s and contained no dialogue, only an off- screen narration. It depicted an anguished woman, Virginia Wolf, leaving a cottage and walking towards a river bank, where she would eventually drown herself. These images were interspersed with images of her husband entering the cottage, dropping his boots on the floor and finding a letter addressed to him, in which he would find out about his wife’s sombre intentions. In addition to these visual stimuli, Virginia’s off- screen voice could be heard reading the farewell note that she had left for her husband. The film was officially audio described in Spanish by a female describer working for ARISTIA S.L., a company that commissions AD projects for ONCE in Spain.

We focused on a sub- excerpt from the opening scene (from 00:

06– 01:45) because it was particularly suitable for the purposes of the research. It also allowed us to erase the off- screen narration without

Cross-fertilization between AD and Interpreting Studies 81 altering the other layers of information, as will be explained below. The corresponding AD script runs as follows:

Sussex, Inglaterra. 1941 [Sussex, England. 1941]; una mujer se anuda el cinturón del abrigo y sale de una casa campestre [a woman ties the belt of her coat and steps out of a cottage]; atraviesa encorvada el jardín de la casa [she crosses, with her back hunched, the house’s garden];

abre una valla y sale a un camino [she opens a fence and walks on to a pathway]; minutos antes había redactado una carta: [minutes earlier she had written a letter]; se detiene en la orilla del río [she stops at the river bank]; Leonard entra en la casa campestre y deja unas botas en el suelo [Leonard enters the cottage and drops a pair of boots on the floor].

A trained female phonetician with wide experience in media voice coaching was hired and exposed to the original describer’s voice.⁴ With the help of the free speech analysis software PRATT (Boersma and Weenink 2000), the phonetician measured the acoustic and dynamic qualities of the original audio describer’s voice. They revealed high energy (high potency), high intensity (loud volume) and a rising pitch contour (vivid intonation). These acoustic features correlate with a confident and optimistic voice and, in psychological terms, they reveal a confident, extrovert and lively personality (Scherer 1979, 2003). The audio describer’s voice was described as ‘institutional’, ‘detached’ and

‘confident’ by the professional phonetician. As these vocalizations did not seem to be congruent with the emotional landscape of the scene, it was decided to run an alternative recording of the same AD script, but this time with more congruent vocal material, using the voice of the female professional phonetician. We then investigated the vocal expression of emotion in the literature on social psychol-ogy, particularly the vocal correlates of sadness. We found that relaxed and hushed vocal qualities combined with low intensity and a falling pitch contour helped to conjure up the listeners’ impressions of sadness (Scherer 2003). With the help of PRATT, we controlled the phoneti-cian’s vocal output as she narrated the AD script for the selected clip, so that the AD voice would fall within the vocal and dynamic parameters of sadness in a controlled environment. We refer to this recording as

‘experimental material’. To ensure the ecological validity of our mate-rial, the mood- incongruent (original) AD narration was recorded again by the same phonetician who had recorded the mood- congruent AD narration (experimental material), so as to be able to contrast the two narrations. We refer to this recording as ‘control material’. It should be

82 Emilia Iglesias Fernández et al.

noted that the linguistic content of the AD narration was the same in both the control and the experimental materials. The ultimate goal was to contrast the response of the participants to the control material (the original, mood- incongruent voice) with their response to the experi-mental material (the mood- congruent voice of the same narrator). Both narrations were produced and used for the assessment of the audio describer’s vocal features, as well as for the assessment of the personality and emotional correlates of her voice.

Two sets of clips were created for both the control and the experi-mental material: in the first set, used in Experiment 1, we purposely excluded the vocal stimuli pertaining to the character’s voice. Virginia’s off- screen narration expressing her anguish was erased from the track because our objective was to elicit the participants’ perceptions of the emotional load in the audio describer’s voice only and we wanted to avoid the bias the linguistic content of Virginia’s foreboding utter-ances might produce. The material retained the soundtrack and ambi-ent sound of the turbulambi-ent river. A  second set of material, used in Experiment 2, was produced with the ultimate goal of exposing users to an authentic product of the sort that would be released in a profes-sional context. This material involved the full aural stimuli: soundtrack, sound effects, AD narration and Virginia’s off- screen voice reading her farewell letter. As we had already produced two AD narrations (one con-gruent and another one inconcon-gruent with the emotional ambiance), we inserted each of these AD tracks in two clips containing Virginia Woolf’s off- screen narration. This resulted in two clips: (1) a congruent and full AD experience; and (2) an incongruent, full AD experience, both with Virginia Woolf’s off- screen thoughts.

All in all, we worked with four clips. The first two explored the effect of vocal sonority and emotional load in a congruent and incongruent AD narration, whereas the other two clips explored the effect in the final AD product.

5.4.3 Experiment 1: assessment of the audio describer’s vocal