 We've all of us experienced, haven't we, from time to time, this phenomenon where you're watching a television program and then you change the channel or an advertisement break comes on and you find, oh, it's either too loud or too soft, so you adjust the volume a little bit and then a few minutes later when you get back to the program again you may find, well, I've got to adjust the volume level again. Now this is something which is not the ingenious fault, it's something to do with the way sound waves work but essentially what loudness is is a way of measuring audio signals so that you capture on the meter scale how loud it will seem to the watcher of the television program and in this way we can regulate the loudness so that it doesn't appear to jump when you move from advertisement to advertisement or program channel to program channel so it's something very much that I think the public is going to welcome. I'm sure it's going to be very successful because it's a very attractive idea it's a very good idea and it's a scientific one it's going to be used first of all in the broadcasting community where we hope that broadcasters will use a loudness meter to adjust the level so that television programs and advertisement breaks and different television channels all don't call for us to adjust the volume on the television set but it probably will go beyond television broadcasters and into the other parts of the audio visual industry because it's an essential tool really for technicians so what we have to have is a special algorithm, a mathematical process that converts the signal into something which is recognizably the same as the loudness is. Yes, but all that has to happen is that somewhere between the making of the programs and the viewer seeing them, somebody has to look at the audio with a loudness meter and adjust it to a prescribed level what you can do then is to either send it to the television receiver the level that you've used or you can use what's called the target loudness level it's the level that we assume if there's no signal to tell you what it is but the answer is yes as long as some time and some place between making the program and the viewer, somebody looks at the signal and adjusts it with a loudness meter the Emmy Award is a kind of Oscar for television and they have Emmys for television programs of course and technical achievements in television and the feeling of the television community is that this is something that was really needed and that it's rather clever and that it's a valuable contribution to the way people experience television programs to the way they enjoy them so it'll help with the great progress forward of television so I guess it's an important thing for program people and that's why we've got this award