Examples of difficult to hear audio?

[allenthalben]

Hello

I'm trying to think of examples of audio that is often much more difficult to hear than regular native speech in order to improve my listening skills, and I was wondering if anyone else had any ideas? All I have so far are:

* Loudspeaker announcements
* Telephone calls
* "Youth speech" even though that makes me sound 50 not 24

Preferably something accessible online too. Thanks in advance

[SCMT]

TV reporters on the street wearing masks.

[ASEAN]

Music in the background or foreground, especially drum beats.

[jeffers]

A chat show where everyone is talking over each other?

[gsbod]

Pretty much every modern atmospheric drama series where the music and sound effects are mixed too loud and the dialogue too quiet and full of muttering.

[Axon]

Old films from the 1960s or earlier tend to be quite hard for me to understand in any foreign language, especially if they were filmed using sound recorded on set instead of dubbed in a studio. Even studio dubbing from older eras of film can be rough sometimes.

If you're having trouble easily finding interesting things to listen to, you can always take something you do find interesting and filter the audio using an audio or video editing program. For instance, you could download a video from YouTube, filter the audio in Audacity by applying heavy High Pass and Low Pass filters, and then re-combine the audio and video in a free video editor like iMovie or Windows Video Editor.

It may be challenging enough to just turn down the volume! We've had discussions here before about how most people tend to listen to L2 media louder than L1 media for the same amount of comprehension.

[allenthalben]

It may be challenging enough to just turn down the volume! We've had discussions here before about how most people tend to listen to L2 media louder than L1 media for the same amount of comprehension.

Oh I'm glad I'm not the only one that's had this experience too then haha. Quite often I notice myself turning something up in German and think "no turn it down so it's more challenging".

Thank you and to everybody else for your other suggestions too, they're all great

[kelvin921019]

Trying using Apple Earpods on a busy street

[Sayonaroo]

Hmm it reminds of a how I met your mother episode called subway wars. In the episode lily says she speaks conductor ( ability to understand muffled announcements in the subway).

I think New Yorkers are better at understanding thick accents just because there’s so much diversity there.