Friday 9 September 2011

Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of nudity, language, harmful or sensitive topics etc.. It is believed to be a very controversial topic and a very two sided argument.
For:

  • Stops young children seeing/hearing inappropriate language and visual imagery. 
  • Allows videos and songs to be shown to a wider target audience. 
  • If films have certificates, why shouldn't things stop being shown in music videos?
Against:

  • Stops artists from being able to fully express themselves. 
  • Creates guidelines for bands to follow. 
  • Its not all equally, in one persons eye it may not be bad, but in another it may come across as offensive. 
An example of a censored video is Lady Gaga - Love Game due to "frequent verbal and visual sexual references".

Ways of hiding censorship:






  • Blanking; when the volume is muted for all or part of the word.
  • Bleeping; playing a noise, usually a "beep", over all or part of the word.
  • Resampling; using a like-sounding portion of vocals and music to override the offending word.
  • Resinging; Replacing a word with a more appropriate word.
  • Backmasking; taking the offending word and reversing the audio, sometimes the whole audio is reversed (often because it is a home-made job), but more usually only the vocal track is reversed.
  • Repeating; repeating the word just said before the explicit word was used.
  • Skipping; deleting the word from the song without a time delay.
  • Echo; instead of saying a word, it echoes the last word(s) said in the line.
  • Disc scratching; in hip hop, scratching on the word, making it sound like another word, or make the word said faster or slower.
  • RoboVoicing; making the word totally non-understandable by overpowering a robovoice effect (usually used as a last resort for home-made jobs).
  • Distorting; Usually in Hip-Hop, less offensive words such as "shit" or else is distorted. It is usually done by shifting down the pitch.
Another example of censorship can be seen in some of Rihanna's videos: http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/876929-top-five-controversial-rihanna-moments

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