According to an article at Wikipedia that doesn't cite and references or sources, the TV bleep censor--the tone played over an increasingly small list of curse words when they're uttered on TV--is generally a 1000 Hz tone. That would put it just flat of a B4.
Let's take an episode of South Park, the very first episode actually ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe"), then select a few lines with lots of bleeped expletives (the scene where Kyle cusses out the aliens) and see if the bleep tone is near a B.
Nope, in this case it's just flat of a C5.
2 comments:
Brilliant!
I really wish the Wiki article would have cited its claim regarding the frequency of the bleep tone.
It really brings up a lot of interesting questions (interesting to me, at least).
Is there a guide to the usage of this tone written down somewhere in a dusty old television standards book somewhere?
Do TV stations have free reign on how they censor stuff? I have witnessed, bleeping, word substitution, and sometimes just a silencing of the profanity.
Very interesting. And, as I told you already, the sound clip is hee-larious.
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