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It will almost certainly seem counter-intuitive to talk about captioning silences. That’s because nearly every definition of closed captioning begins and ends with measurable, acoustically quantifiable sounds. For example, Wikipedia describes closed captioning as a “transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (either verbatim or in edited form), sometimes including non-speech elements.” The FCC defines closed captioning as “A service for persons with hearing disabilities that translates television program dialog into written words on the television screen.” Whereas the Wikipedia entry seems to leave room for the possibility that the entire audio track (i.e. all sounds) might be captioned, the FCC focuses narrowly on “dialog” or speech. Nevertheless, both definitions are concerned exclusively (and not surprisingly) with sound.

Yet captioning is complex, perhaps more complex than we’ve ever previously considered. In some well-defined situations, silence must be captioned. We need at times to make room on the caption track for sudden quiet, the illusion of speech (i.e. mouthed words), intentional loss of audio, and the cessation of sustained sounds. While a lack of sound would seem, at first blush, to fall outside the captioner’s purview, it becomes significant for the captioner when it is tied to our visual expectations about how sound works.

Let me share a few examples, organized into three categories. The categories are not exhaustive. All of the examples below are pulled from the official versions shown on TV or DVD. Continue reading Captioned silence?