Recently Great Scott built his version of an automatic volume adjuster. In this project he solved one of the biggest problems with modern movies, which is that the conversation volume is way too low in comparison to the music volume. That is why he combined an Arduino microcontroller with a microphone and an IR LED in order to create his automatic volume adjuster. It basically detects when loud movie music starts playing, lowers the volume by sending the respective IR remote control command and then brings the volume back up when the music is over.

Since using an Arduino for this task is a bit of an overkill, here's a version for the ATtiny13A.