I Need a Word

[kaasirpent]

Not just any word. A specific word to describe a type of distortion I hear in podcasts from time to time.

It typically happens during an interview, when, say, two or more people are recording a podcast and at least one of them is using Skype. When the computer gets a little busy, the audio processing can't seem to keep up, so there's a momentary "stretching" of the syllable the person is saying and it comes out sounding like the audio equivalent of a pixellated image.

The person might be saying "I visited Spain as a high school senior," but the processor gets a little overburdened during 'Spain' and it comes through as "I visited Spaaaaaaaaain as a high school senior."

Another time I hear it is when watching satellite TV and there's weather, the same thing happens in video as well as audio. The image will freeze on one kind of pixellated image and the sound will do that same thing.

It's so hard to find an audio clip to give you an example when I don't know the stupid word to use to look up said clip to get said word.

This, however, is what I was able to find because it's the one case I remember from a movie where the effect was used on purpose. This is a clip from The Matrix just as Neo starts to fall down the rabbit hole.

I have it cued up right to the point where the voice distortion happens. Stupid thing. It claimed to be cued up at the point. Fast forward to 54 seconds, or just before that.

So. What do you call that? Is there jargon for it?

Comments

[cfred.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, I was in an Explorer Post at a radio station. We had access to the production studios during our meetings.

So my first thought was, what piece of equipment would have generated the effect?

It doesn't quite sound like flanging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanging), but that's the closest term I can think of.

[skreeky]

Well, for the video we call it "Getting a case of the blockies."

[temporus.livejournal.com]

The way you describe it reminds me a bit of Max Headroom. Not that that helps lock down the terminology, but it's definitely some kind of signal distortion, a buffer overflow or something along those lines.

[happy-buddha.livejournal.com]

The actual term in video is artifacting. it has to do with the basis of video compression, which started when they realized you didn't have to have every bit of info for every frame, rather just the parts that change. So the blockies are just when the replacement data didn't make it...

[ex-prunesnp.livejournal.com]

Artifacts are also what I came up with.