99% Invisible - 127- The Sound of Sports

Episode Date: August 12, 2014

Way back in October 2011 (see episode #38, true believers!), we broadcast a short excerpt of a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews about faking the sounds of sports on TV broadcasts. It was one of our most popular and provocative programs … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A couple of years ago, we presented a story produced by Paragren Andrews about how certain sounds, like the sounds of skis on a cross-country track, or hoofbeats on a horse racing track, were faked on sports broadcasts. It ended up being one of our most popular and provocative episodes ever, meaning because people really taken it back by the notion that any part of a sporting event might be faked. That episode was just a small excerpt of a much longer documentary called The Sound of Sport. And we got a number of requests from our audience over the years asking where they could hear the entire piece. And today, my friends, we are going to present it to you in its full glory. This is a fascinating, exquisitely produced, deep, deep dive into the sound design of

sports broadcasting. A subject that I've met most people have never even considered before. That's just one of the reasons why I love it. Keep in mind, this was a rivently broadcast in 2011, so it's after the World Cup in South Africa and before the London Olympic Games in 2012, so just to place you in the proper sports history context. This is The Sound of Sport, produced by Peregrine Andrews for voluntary productions and presented by Dennis Baxter.

I like listening to sports. I can close my eyes. I can hear every single one in my head. It's my belief that people have ingrained in them a memory of certain sounds, and if that sound is not fulfilled, then the mind knows that there's something wrong. There is an expectation of what football sounds like, and it certainly wasn't. The vizellas, the plastic of the World Cup in South Africa and those damn Vuvuzillas. For many people, this was the first time they'd really thought about how sports to sound. But it's what I spend my life thinking and dreaming about. I'm Dennis Baxter, and I design the sound of sports for television. For nearly 20 years,

I've worked exclusively on the Olympics as their staff sound designer and engineer. I decide how to capture each event sonically so that it brings as much drama and excitement into the home as possible. They get away at first time, Paul has got a very good start, so did Dexel. I'm gearing up for London 2012. It is going to be a big job. I'll be using a team of 350 sound mixers, about 600 sound technicians and close to 4,000 microphones.

It's a new, long record! I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, 1954, and essentially I think that I've been a sound person my entire life. When I was about eight or nine years old, my dad bought me a cassette recorder, and I was recording everything. I would go into the bathroom, my mom would be on the toilet, and I would just pop in with the microphone and start recording her. Monkle had a restaurant, and I washed an awful lot of dishes, and when I was 14 years old,

had enough money to buy a real real recorder. It was around $1,000 at the time. It was a staggering sum in 1968. This is the size of a big suitcase. I couldn't drive, so I used to hitchhike and carry that record to the churches and to the high schools and record just about anything that I could possibly record. I was a veteran so I went to school on my GI Bill and studied economics. They taught me a lot about borrowing money.

So at the end of my college degree, I had done my final papers on a recording studio and had convinced a bank to loan me the money and before I knew it, I was several hundred thousand dollars in debt. That recording studio dream is a misguided dream that you're going to make your own music and live happily ever after. And then all of a sudden you're struggling to get people into the studio recording things that you don't want to record and frustrated with the situation. Music

We're just minutes away from the first event on the ESPN schedule. In 1982, I found another and more profitable use of audio skills at the newly formed sports television channel ESPN schedule. In 1982 I found another and more profitable use of audio skills at the newly formed sports television channel ESPN. Instead of musicians now I was capturing the sound of car racing, tennis, baseball, football, whatever they sent my way. Your Majesty I humbly ask you to declare the Olympic Games of 1948 open. That was the first Olympics to be televised by the BBC, though fewer than 100,000 homes

had television at the time. As you can hear, there is just past Nankivo. And it's Erickson's contour to the finish. Erickson is sweet and one strand. Like how you say it's a whole strand. As you can hear, there isn't much more than commentary to be heard. Six was Bergkiss, six Bergkiss and seventh Nankivo. My own relationship with the Olympics began in 1992 when I was offered the first full-time job as a soundseater.

I went back and listened to every single sport, trying to understand why we were covering the sports the way that we were, what sounds were there, and what sounds were really missing and why. I came from music, I came from a recording studio, and I wanted to apply those techniques and standards to the live world. And one of the first things we implemented in the Olympics was a lot more close-miking. This is where you put a microphone as close as possible to the sound source. If you use this technique, you need a lot of microphone because each microphone can only capture a little piece of the whole picture. But you get more detail

and definition and a hell of a lot better sound. and a elbow and a better sound. The parallel bars and the uneven bars for the women's gymnastics. When you put the microphones that close to the athlete, you hear the flexing of the bar. You hear the breathing. You can even hear the rustling of the clothing. My dad was very anti-rock and roll and he goes, okay, I'll get you a guitar and I was just thrilled. Well, come Christmas morning, he got me a guitar and it was an acoustic guitar with a Chad

Ackon's record. And I love Chad Ackon to this day, but for the next two years after I got the acoustic guitar, all I was trying to do was make it louder. And I stumbled across the contact microphone, which is a device, a microphone that you actually can stick right onto the top of the guitar to amplify. It picks up the actual vibrations of the wood and consequently the sound of the guitar. 30 years later, I'm looking at gymnastics. The balance beam is a synthetic resin type of material that athletes, they balance on, they do somersaults, they do all kinds of routines on top of it. And I'm hearing this balanced being, I say, I mean, that has a certain resonance in there

that we cannot hear, that someone probably has never heard. Is that a new texture that we should put into the mix? And by the time we put the contact microphones on there, it gave a new level of depth because the contact microphone hears the vibration in the entire bar. Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaaaa, Niharaaaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaaaaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaa, Niharaaaaa What? Be it for fun! For sets, Roger Federer to serve. Ready? Ready. 2008.

Here we go. Play. In 2008, the team responsible for the sound of the Wimbledon-Mins file was nominated for a BAFTA award. I love atmosphere. That is my job as far as I'm concerned. It's the atmosphere that you generate that makes people be there. that makes people be there. I'm Bill Wiston and I'm the sound supervisor who did the sound for the 2008 Wimbledon tennis finals, the Gents. That's the sound of Wimbledon. That hush, the bouncing of the ball on the court.

That atmosphere is the sort of thing that I am trying to bring into the home. That hush, when everybody is fully expectant of something brilliant to happen. There's lots of microphones on the court. Basically the court is covered by a very nice small stereo mic. Stuck on the back of the court just above the centre-line judges' head. So that occasionally causes an interesting moment when they shout. Hi! I'm not that excited with the call of the right place line, but what was the call of the front? Mae'r ymwch i'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy'n fwy And you will no doubt have seen on close-ups of the chair when the contestants are sitting either side of the chair during changeovers that you have an array of microphones actually

on the chair. And those are used to these days ever since Mr McEnroe's outburst to try and pick up anything that's interesting and said to the Ompaer. Crawford serves, lines get to back in the centre, Crawford drives into the net, that's bad, man for him. The way tennis used to be covered way back in the early days was to actually have what was called an apple and biscuit microphone. They'd stick that over the top of the umpire's chair so you've got a bit of umpire on as well as the rather distant smashes of the ball. His service puts him at such an advantage even when Crawford gets it back, if he's able to come up and value it and put the more where he likes.

Crawford returns the service and it's out. Any love? When I first joined outside broadcasts, they were still doing mono. It was early 80s and I was asked to do court two in stereo to see if we could develop a technique for doing that. I came to in the end using quite a posh and expensive and not very weatherproof microphone which is a beautiful stereo microphone but really normally used for covering orchestras and then that meant that your players were actually moving around, left to right, as they

ran around the court. 15 ohm. That's now evolved into a surround technique where you have not only the crowd and the players in front of you, but the crowd also goes all the way around the back of you. So when you're in the middle of a cheering crowd, when it's been accorded well, the surround really involves you in the play, if you like. It's like actually being there. 3015. The dynamic range, the difference between the quietest noise and the loudest noise doesn't have to keep you on your toes.

If you've got the court mix on a fader and you take that fader down in anticipation of it getting very loud on the court and you do it ahead of time, you ruin the effect. What you've got to do is time it in such a way that the second that that quiet atmosphere changes into the huge roar from the crowd, you've got a split second to fade down that effect, if you like. APPLAUSE Over the years, I've managed to develop this sort of sixth sense in a way that I can guess pretty much now, nine times out of ten, what the crowd's going to do. Getting that exciting stillness, anticipation,

and then this huge roar when it's all developed into something really wonderful. And of course, keeping the commentator on top of it. Well, that would be the right time to serve your first ace. And I'll now, with a second set point. What was brilliant about that particular final was that they let it breathe. They didn't talk all over it all the time. I have had a number of people say to me,

is there any way that we could have a feed without a commentator? I think that would be something that people would really appreciate. You could add your own commentary then. But juicers of the old school would tell a commentator to shut up. I don't think many do now. I'm Barry Davis and for a few years I've been a commentator on various things. When a goal is scored, I would just call my commentator for his position just for five wind up the sound of the crowd and then let him come in. I used to try and make a thought in my mind that if you can't think of what to say, say nothing, which is actually the best policy, but invariably one forgets that from time to time, we don't carry it away with the emotion. Euro 96 when England played Germany in the semi-final. I can remember very well.

Four, I would have thought something close to ten minutes before the teams came out. So much good sound from around the stadium. Just with a few observations and commentators. Everyone joining in. The famous... those who come to support the opposition. And those only well known to their friends. People may be unaware of what I'm trying to achieve, but if you've got a bunch of people sitting at home going,

gosh, wasn't that a terrific match. They don't actually say gosh wasn't the sound terrific but you know that is so much part of it. In a football match what we do nowadays is to have a stereo atmosphere mic and then 12 mics around the pitch, which you fade up and down as the ball moves up and down the pitch, in other words chasing the ball around, so you can get the kicks and the scuffles and the shouting and all that sort of stuff. It's a difficult technique to get across to people who haven't done it before. It's anticipating where the ball is going to go. Personally, I don't favor the system of fixed microphones around the pitch that Bill describes.

I prefer to use four roving operators who each point a directional microphone at the action. They follow the action. I believe that this gives a better, more defined kick sound and a some method I've used at the last four Olympics and we're using London for the 2012 football events. What you're hearing now is a game from the Athens Olympics in 2004. The In every Olympic games, I try to rush of the excitement and entertainment value. And certainly, winter sports are fun because you're trying to convey a sense of speed and motion.

I've always enjoyed the sound of Bob's sled. In Vancouver, there were 44 cameras. At each camera position, there was a distinctly different oral perspective and I was trying to put the viewer, the listener, into place of the athlete. And I made every camera position a sound zone. Some people may say that 284 microphones is a bit excessive. But you have to remember that every camera perspective, every visual perspective for the viewing audience has a different sound texture and a different sound color. It's like a piece of music that if you just sit and listen to the crowd, you hear like how it swells and dives and peaks and then suddenly bursts, it sounds to me like an orchestra.

I'm Rob Nox. I'm a sound effects recordist for movies in Hollywood. I get hired by the movie studios to record sounds specifically for their movie. For example, if you have a specific sports movie, be it horse racing, hockey, figure skating, football, basketball, they bring me into capture the essence of the crowds and the game itself.

The sound of the basketballs, the sound of horses hooves, horses breathing, players tackling each other, all that kind of good stuff. So they bring me in so that they can recreate the feeling of being really into that event when you see the movie. The game of their lives, it was the greatest team in any sport I have ever seen. The game of their lives is a football movie, the 1950 US men's national soccer team that was competing in the World Cup in Rio in Brazil and they went on to be England

Which was shocking at the time because England was the best team on the planet and America was probably One of the worst teams. I was asked to go down to record football crowds for the movie in North America We don't have football crowds that are that exciting and ran bunches. I went to Brazil and I recorded football games. I went to Marumbi Stadium to record a game between Brazil and Bolivia, and the crowd was insane. I would just move around the stadium and listen for pockets of chanting and cheering or loud fans and listening for the energy. They are out of their mind singing in huge 10 foot drums.

When you can feel someone screaming and their guts are coming out as they're yelling, that's going to translate when you hear it in the movie. So I'm looking to record the people that are really passionate and into it. And so I would set up near them. I had a handheld recorder. I'd try to not let them know I was recording. So I didn't want to change their performance.

Hey! Good work! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! If you have people in the loop group, you know, actors, they're not going to go that deep

and scream like a fan and an audience welcome. It's amazing. When you can recreate with real people that energy, that's the way to do a sports movie. That's a feel! Yeah! Sound puts you in the actual environment, and it really does create an emotional response. My name is Gordon Dürerty. I am the studio audio director, Adelaide Tronik-Arts Canada, specifically the sports video game end of the company.

So we make games like FIFA, hockey, soccer, American football, golf, pretty much the entire range of sports. We're taking a scientific approach to a very emotional process, which is, let's re-analyze how crowds work. Instead of this big wash of sound where everything's happening at once, because that guy in the corner there whose face is painted purple, and he's got his team shirt on, and he's got a big drum, and he's trying to get his corner of the stadium all riled up.

Maybe a wave starts around the stadium, or maybe it doesn't. So our future push is, let's get into actually modeling all riled up. Maybe a wave starts around the state and maybe it doesn't. So, you know, our future push is, let's get into actually modeling how crowds behave and how these different particles of sound actually interact to create a large crowd. We work a lot at how can we keep improving the actual game experience. We try to bring it down as authentic as possible, but then we have to go beyond because normally you would not hear the details of the sound on the pitch on TV, but as a gameplay you expect to hear the kicks. For this last South African world cup, we hired people in South Africa to record the crowds.

We have to build a game quite a few months in advance of the event. We actually had the crowds come back from South Africa and I went down to one of the audio sound guys rooms and I kept hearing the speed hives going on. What is this thing? This is driving me bonkers. Can we not turn that thing off or down? You guys know this is this vuvazela thing. It's part of the thing but you have to have this or it's not authentic. So we actually put a mute button on, finally, to say that you can mute it or lower the volume of it. And then when the actual World Cup started in South Africa, people were saying, you know,

how come the TV channels can't just put a mute button like they do in the actual video game? Dovina is another one of my favorite sports. This is a great example of really trying to isolate the micro-sounds of the sport. You can really separate the above sounds in the swimming hall and the below sounds, the underwater sounds. Really conveys the sense of focus and the sense of isolation of the athlete. We have microphones on the handrails as the divers walk up. You can hear their hands, you can hear their feet, you can hear them breathing. Eyes, eyes, eyes. I'm five. Oh. We have a microphone at the bottom of the pool under the water.

The athlete goes under the water, we shift the perspective to just them in the underwater sound. You hear the bubbles. You get the complete sense of isolation, the complete after hearing the coverage in Barcelona of the 92 Olympics. There were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The third in the impact of the target. That's a no-brainer in a little bit of the athlete as they're getting ready. But it probably goes back to the movie Robin Hood.

I have a memory of the sound, and I have an expectation. So I was going, okay, what would be really, really cool in archery to take it up a notch? And the obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target, which was the type of sound.

So we looked at a little thing, called a boundary microphone. They lay flat, it was flatter than a pack of cigarettes, I put a little windshield on it and I put it on the ground between the athlete and the target and it completely opened up the sound to something different. And then I pulled the point, total 0.7-1.

For some reason, directors don't like to see the microphones. They do like hearing good sound, but there is a resistance to actually seeing microphones in the picture, which is one of the challenges that we have. And the boundary microphone fulfilled that challenge because you could creep the microphone closer to the actual source. Because the ampah has to line up the boat's first wall and get them into line and see if they're both straight.

The ampah has been down, he came down about a quarter of an hour ago to line up the actual stake bridge. The engine of the launch has started up and the excitement is growing quite visibly or orderly on both sides of the river now. I wonder if you can hear them on this type of a. Well, we find ourselves on a quite glorious day down on the Thames of the boat race and it's absolutely magnificent. Paul Davis, I'm an executive producer with BBC Sport, look after tennis, rugby union, golf, the boat race and a few other things. Sound is, it's a hidden jewel, isn't it, really? I mean, I think it's one of those things that one takes for granted because for obvious reasons you can't see it and when it's going great,

no one sort of refers to it, when it it goes wrong there is literally a deathly silence. I'm a huge supporter of sound in outside broadcast television and I think the guys that we work with really respect that. My name's Andy James, I'm a sound supervisor. We're at the other boat race at Putney and my job is about augmenting what you're seeing with what you hear. Everything we've done has been fine. Okay, I've saved my own pre-delay. Whenever I look at a shot, I want to try and better it with a sound.

That's always my aim. So Paul cuts up a really, really good shot of the crews and you can see the looks on their faces. I want to hear every bit of effort they're putting into that stroke and that's really what our job is about. Make sure that every shot Paul cuts up we can match it with sound and make it even better. I'm looking at the gym at the opposite of the bowed house. There's a nice lower balcony that's very clear and

would look very good I think. Quite often a lot of the motivation for directing an outside broadcast is visually driven but often I think that can come from sound as well. And if we have two very motivated coxes and they're both mic'd up and they're delivering some outstanding sound then there's a real motivation A to hear that sound, to understand what they're delivering instruction wise and actually just to add atmosphere as well, then that's hugely motivating in terms of going visually to their cameras to see the cocks delivering it and then how the rows are reacting to it as well. So those motivational reasons

for hearing sound I think is great, rather than it just being wallpaper. We're passing the boat houses now, we're just going to take the Oxford Stroke. Now then, in, out, one, out, two, out, three, out. We're sort of bleeding through Georgie, but again, really good. I've got three and four of the coxies, but I don't have one and two. Okay, seven boat house and eight boat house. So Oxford on seven. On the boat race, we've got about six different shore sites

all the way down the course. We're at Putney at the moment, which is where the boats start. And we've got various stereo effects mics up and down the towpath. And then as we move from site to site, moving down the course, we have local effects mics there that are radio link back to us here where I can mix them in to the main

sound. We also have mics on the crew boats themselves and on the chase boats, so we can pick out the various different effects that we need as the boats move off down the river. The time has come. We start off the first half of the programme, we'll all be a presentation element when the presenters will be introducing what's going on, Clair Bauding will be with us. And this is the time, their time. Good afternoon, it's just gone according to four, we are live in the boat house of last year's winning crew Cambridge University.

So that's the first element and then we move into the race itself and I'm basically moving along my sound desk from left to right. Starting for... Just give us five minutes, Joe. Hi. I've got a 96-fader mixing desk here and I'm starting from the left hand end. I've got my commentary mic stand when in. The first stroke is so important.

It has to be good. 600 more to come but the first one is the platform which is the best. We've got various high-distant effects mics, one up on the hoist, which gives them a panoramic view of Patney. Then we move on down towards I like to backfade the 41 by now,

we're into mics in the boat houses themselves. Then we're kind of into the race itself, the start of the race, and we've got the umpires, both as the umpires get the race started. Then there's the Oxford and Cambridge boats themselves, and there's two effects mics that hopefully pick up the sound of the rowing. The coxies on the boats have a mic on them, personal mic on them. Yeah, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice 20 seconds 20 Pass it No! Jenny ready for a 4-10 10 10 10 10

10 10 10 10 10 10 Sometimes the language that comes from the Cox isn't broadcastable so we have to have an alternative to go to and that's part of the on a live job like this you've got to work out what the cox is are saying is it transmittable but nevertheless what they're saying is it gives you really good information I'm not right there boys. I'm not right there. Turn it on the bend boy. Steading third of a length down.

Shining on boys. Shining on the bend boy. Steading on the bend boy. Steading third of a length down. Shining on boys. Steading on the bend boy. Steading on the bend boy. Steading third of a length down.

Shining on boys. Steading on the bend boy. Steading on the bend boy. Steading third of a length down. Shining on boys. Steading on the bend boy. Steading on the bend boy The boys stay long on the road. Just think about that. The boys for ten. Think about that, boys. Ready? Go! Coming into the pit! Woo!

Then we're into the various shore sites. So there's another 15 fades down there of shore sites which will be able to pick up the crowds that are locally watching from the various different places on the race. They tend to give us a good bit of colour because they're all having parties. It's about building up a multi-layered or rural picture. Ops from there, heading towards Victory. It is all that's starting there. It is Chazic Bridge at the top of your picture and the finish line sits just before that. to the left hand side and Simon went to leave this his work again, shouting not letting

up. They will not let up Oxford. Cambridge run for the winning post. Oxford, two on the two lengths behind, two on half lengths behind. Flags gone down, Cambridge run, one, Cambridge run by two on a half lengths behind, flags gone down, Cambridgeer 1, Cambridgeer 1 by two and a half lengths. Cambridge have won the boat race of 1933. Cambridge still had a slightly higher stroke rate, but into the final straight they come. And the pace, of course, from Oxford has dropped slightly, hunched the girls' time,

but the jade is on the stun. As a spectator, you actually see very little of the race. You'll see the start, all the finish-ups and we're in between. What we can do is actually convey an atmosphere throughout the whole race for the viewer, so you actually get a much better experience. After the peak last year, in 2011, the Thames belongs to Oxford. To them, the victory, the smiles, the celebrations, the spoils, everything is theirs and Cambridge had for his left. I think it's all about layering. With pictures, there's a degree of layering, but it's fairly clear cut. Literally, you're cutting between pictures.

With the sound, I think you can build up the layers. Covering anthems, for example, during six nations. And whether you, when you go to the anthems shots of the teams, and you're tracking along the close-ups of the players, do you actually want to hear the choral singing of the stadium, or do you want to hear in all your respect the fairly poor singing of the individual players? That's an interesting mix that the sound guys have to deal with, because you want the personality and clearly they know the words but often they're not sung very well. If you didn't hear their sounds at all, then you'd feel a bit cheated. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, For years we used to sit with a radio mic on the referee but it wasn't transmitted.

And then eventually the rugby union officials decided to let us transmit this wonderful addition to the commentary. That's what it is. It's part of the commentary. And I think it adds so much. I don't think you could use the technique for football. Take the hits, please on contact. You make sure you go straight. You go straight. technique for football. Touch! Holes! Hey guys! So the addition of a microphone on the rugby referee opened up another dimension. It puts you right into the game. You can be the player. I believe that is the future of sports sound.

Microphones on the athletes and players themselves. If you can persuade them to wear them. Yep! microphones on the athletes and players themselves, if you can persuade them to wear them. And here's another sport that benefited hugely from this technique. We're trying to catch, we're trying to catch. Curling was introduced to the Olympics in 1988 when the winter Olympics went to Calgary and the rest of the world going curling. We're trying to catch, we're trying to catch. Calgary and the rest of the world going curling, curling. How are we going to make curling exciting? How are we going to introduce curling to the world?

And early on we started putting microphones wireless, microphones on the curlers. That's all. Oh yeah, if we know that it's a pretty big pocket, if we freeze in the back we're not, no it's it. They're a strategy, they're encouraging each other, they're Or... They're a strategy.

They're encouraging each other. They're talking, they're constantly talking. There's a lot of screaming. It's a very, very vocal sport. There's a half-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or-or- audience and it has really been a huge boost in the ratings and the interest in the sports. With a video game it's an interesting position in that you are the player on the field. You're also the viewer of the game, so you're sort of in this weird place where you're sort of a spectator, but you're also an active participant. What we found with the sound is that we had to pretty much exaggerate. For instance, on a boxing game, we record the real boxes, but we just don't get the clean sound to get like things like grunts and groans and punches and impacts.

So we go into a studio and sometimes we'll recreate a boxing ring to do the feet and the falls. And then what we'll do is we'll close Mike, it's called a foliardis, it's basically the people that do the footsteps and all the sort of hand props and everything for film and television. We'll have the person punch a punching bag or a side a bee for whatever and just get all of the actual punch sounds. A high, low, medium, hard, different angles. Then we'll get voice down to coming and do things like all the,

the boxing sniffs and all the grunts and groans, and we'll then do things like, break celery and lard into a body impact sound to get like a cracking rib type of sound. So all of those elements we carefully craft in a studio environment, and then when we layer that back into the game and we blend that in and then we add the live crowds from the venues and we dress it all up, the whole net effect of that is that it does feel fairly authentic. On the tennis game called Grand Slam Tennis, what I did, and I stick a lot of tracking down, was try to get tapes from the French Open. It's similar, I got some tapes from Wimbledon as well.

So we were able to get a number of matches with different players and different sizes of venues and just basically extract the crowd from there. And Mac and Ro, the William sisters, grunts, they have very unique sort of streaks and screams that tennis players do. We were actually able to pull that off the tape as well. I think it was Venus said wow, you know, it sounds just like me serving. I said well, it is exactly're serving, because it is you serving that we extracted.

15. I was doing American car racing. They call it NASCAR. And this particular race was a half mile oval. And essentially, what would be considered a football type stadium with very high banking. The cars put out 140 decibels of sound, maybe more than you put 40 of those cars on a half mile track and it just sounds like a hornet nest. There's no real definition. Then all of a sudden the show is over and there supposedly is the roar of the crowd,

but the producers screaming, I can hear the crowd, I can't hear the crowd. It's a very basic physics issue where the sound that I want or being massed or being drowned out by these cars. So I said, okay, you know, I learned my lesson. I went back to my home studio and I started pulling up some crowd samples and building different textures and things like that. So my next race, you know, when they showed the crowd, I started sneaking some stuff in. And when it came to the end of it, it was a very, very nice crowd swell. a very, very nice crowd as well. And the same producers, you know, you get in the out of the boys and you know, this is great. This is what I want. This is what we're trying to achieve. And then a week later he found out that I'd use the sample. And

then I get a call and said, you're cheating. And I'm saying, well, you know, all right, who am I cheating? Am I cheating the audience? No, the audience sees a crowd. The audience has certain expectations. You'll see a crowd, you hear a crowd. There's some sports that you just cannot capture the natural sound. Cross-country skiing, byathlon is another one because of the size of the course. And this has been further complicated because as the camera lenses have gone up 110, 120, 130,

140 to one, these cameras are able to see a half a kilometer or maybe a kilometer down the course. Now how do you replicate that sound? Essentially if if you've got cameras that are that far apart from each other, you're putting 20 or 30 microphones to fill as the athletes are coming to you, which is not practical. I am not a purist whatsoever in sound production. I truly believe that whatever the tool takes to deliver a high-quality, entertaining soundscape is all fair game. And that has caused some issues because I use samplers. What a sampler is, it's a keyboard that's attached to essentially a digital recorder.

When you hit the key on the keyboard, it triggers the sound to play back and with the keyboard it also triggers with sensitivity meaning that if I hit the key real hard it'll have a little bit more of a harder attack and you can vary the pitch. If I hit a step. So for the ski end, it gives a sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh.

Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh.

Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh. Sh my biggest problems was rowing. Rowing is a two kilometer course. They have four chase boats following the rowers and they have a helicopter.

That's what they need to deliver the visual coverage of it. But the helicopter and the chase boat just completely wash out the sand. So no matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture, you cannot reach, and isolate sound like you do visually. But people have expectations, okay? If you see the rovers, they have a sound that they're expecting. So what do we do? That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers and recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event. And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats.

The Australians have bitten something back from them, but not enough. Great Britain, gold medals, Stephen Redgrade, Matthew Benson, mission accomplished. Standby. And they're racing. Good evening to Spatch, although Victoria Spanches dropped back to last early, first to begin on the far side

as Dan Ceeces is out there in the early stages going far two is. When we do our horse racing, you're not going to get somebody running around the course after the horses, because no way. And occasionally you will come across very close up pictures of the horses over the far side, which is done off one of our roving cameras.

But you have engine noise in that case, so therefore you wouldn't want a microphone on that, because all you would hear is the car revving up and the camera and cursing. So basically, the way you cover all that sort of stuff is to run a tape which has the sound of horses who's galloping, which is actually, if I remember rightly, a slowed down buffalo charge. Buffalo charge. And if they're doing hurdles you will have a tape which has the sound of somebody falling through a hedge, I suppose you call it, it's rustling all the time. So as they go through or over, hopefully the hurdle, you actually fade this up and if you're clever at it you vary the level a little bit so it sounds like several horses going through together. That's pretty much a standard thing and I think it's probably the same recording they've used for years.

Some horse racing events sound strange to me because they have this constant thundering sound and I can't tell if it's real or not. It's like in horse racing movies like I did see biscuit and all hat. I know you can hear the jockeys yelling and screaming at each other especially when they get tight on a turn. You hear the whips going. I recorded an Arabian horse. Arabians have a different gate than thoroughbreds. And I put four wireless mics or phones on each hoof. We wanted to control the speed of the horse, so we had the trainer run the horse in a circle with a rope. We wanted to control the movement because we have $12,000 in gear on the horse. He did kick one microphone off.

If I was going to be in charge for the sound of a real event, I would want to do like the Kentucky Derby and use mycoras around the track and have some onboard mics and then have mics in the crowd and have mics on the gate. Of course racing fans, they get really crazy when they're cheering. Does people are yelling? Come on! Come on! They're screaming at the top of their lungs and yelling.

Sixty! Darts is all about fun, so you know we like to have a bit of fun as well with the sand. So what we do is we use the real sand of the dart hitting the board to trigger some samples and we play around with kick drums, snare drums, dustbin's falling over and anything else we can find and it just adds a bit of fun really to what can you know get a bit repetitive. It's not real but it's enhances. That's something that I think most of us involved in sport, try and do, try and enhance the experience. We tread the middle road between what's real and what's unreal.

If you're sitting at the side of a basketball court from a TV point of view, the producers want to hear the ball as it goes through the net, the swishing of the net. And that is certainly something that you do not ever hear in the basketball arena. You only hear that on TV because it's exciting. Samuel L. Jackson, I came to teach boys and you became men. This is our time! Coach Carter. For Coach Carter, the supervising sound editor wanted me to get the sound of the basketball, but he wanted... there's a ping. I don't know if you've ever heard of basketball, but when you bounce it, it goes,

bounce ping! And it kind of has this high airy ring. We did this great rim stuff, like rim slams, rim hits, net wishes, and then we're trying to capture the sound of this ping. And we were right under the net, and I'm like, no, that's not it. It just sounds like the big thud of a basketball and the reverb in the room.

But then we went into the corner of the room, and I got elevated on the bleachers, and I had my microphone above the ball, and the guy slammed the ball on the ground, and then as the ball was coming up to my microphone, you hear the ping. I've always taken the approach to record the sound's documentary style like accurate and then I try to then find the next level up to go heightened reality. Sometimes you actually have to cheat a sound even bigger

to make it cut through. The thing that Hollywood does differently is it sounds huge. The movies sound big, they sound rich. It's definitely more theatrical than real. Just think fast and furious or die hard. As we've been doing this over the years, sort of emulating broadcast and enhancing it, the broadcasters have been listening to what we've been doing and then using our techniques back in the actual broadcast.

It's very interesting at ESPN, we told them, hey, we're trying to look at your broadcast model to try to sort of capture that classic broadcast thing, and then they told us, well, we've actually been playing your game, and we really love the fact that you guys, you know, push up the wooshes on the bats. So what they do now on broadcast is they actually zip those sounds up, meaning that, you know, when you listen to a baseball game now versus 10 years ago, you hear these big bat wooshes and arm throws and big fat catcher mitts, because they have mics located

very close to capture those sounds. Many years ago the audio that people would have been used to expecting from a football match would have been the ground noise and that was all. Whereas now they expect to hear every kick, every grunt, every whistle of the referee because that's what they get used to hearing on video games, on films that have been post-dubbed. So we're always trying to match that sort of sand.

The challenge for me is to make sports on TV is engaging as film or video games. If we don't, we're going to lose out. But it's the challenge I welcome. I'm gearing up for London 2012 where the games will be presented in high-definition picture and certainly in surround sound. I'll be pushing to create the best, most involving, most detailed sound ever at the Olympics, and one thing that makes me very happy is I hear that the Vuvuzillas will be banned from the games. I leave you with one of my favorite sounds, the equestering jumping event. The Sound of Sport was presented by Dennis Baxter and produced by Peregrin Andrews. It was a fallen tree production originally produced for BBC Radio 4 in 2011.

99% Invisible is Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, Avery Truffleman, and me, Roman Mars. The 99PI experience isn't just this episode you're hearing. We are also all on Twitter at Roman Mars, Sam listens, Katie Mingle and Truffleman. We're all still on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Spotify, SoundCloud. If you pick something out and search for 99% of visible, you're probably going to find us there. And you are always welcome to stop by our place at 99pi.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.