(WIP)
About
Descriptive Noise refers to a line of text used to describe noises in the background of a movie or television show while watching with closed captioning turned on. Screenshots of these captions and the scene they are describing are often found on Tumblr, pointing out of the often absurd nature of these descriptions, similar to YouTube Automatic Caption Fails
Origin
On June 13th, 2011, the single topic blog Descriptive Noise[1] launched, with a still shot from the History Channel’s show Larry the Cable Guy (shown below). Larry and five teenagers are shown holding up frogs and smiling while the caption reads [indistinct mumbling].
Precursor
Prior to blogs focusing specifically on the way sounds are captioned, on November 7th, 2006, a poster on Fark[2] started a photoshop thread for users to post fake closed captioned photos (shown below, left). Between December 2011 and September 2012, several series of comically closed captioned photos that may have been due to errors during live captioning (shown below, center) as well as amusing subtitles due to mistranslation (shown below, right) appeared on humor sites including Smosh[3], Uproxx[4], World Wide Interweb[5] and the Chive.[6]
Spread
Notable Examples
“[Muffled Rap Music Playing in the Distance]”
Search Interest
External References
[1] Tumblr – Descriptive Noise
[2] Fark – Photoshop theme: Inapproriate or funny closed captioning. Link goes to inspiration
[3] Smosh – 17 Closed Caption Fails
[4] Uproxx – Chinese Bootleg’s Subtitles For ‘The Avengers’ May Be Better Than The Movie Itself
[5] World Wide Interweb – THE FUNNIEST CLOSED CAPTIONS IN SPORTS HISTORY
[6] The Chive – Perfectly excecuted closed captions (21 Photos)