99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-38- Sound of Sport

Episode Date: October 13, 2011

If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Morris. If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don't notice that they're doing their job.

But they are so good at doing their job, you probably don't even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible. And that doesn't mean that they throw a bunch of microphones on the field. This is Dennis Baxter, sound designer of the Olympics. This is Dennis Baxter, sound designer of the Olympics.

There's some sports that you just cannot capture the natural sound. Cross-country skiing by Athlon 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 1, these cameras are able to see a half a kilometer, maybe a kilometer down the course. Now how do you replicate that sound? Essentially, if you 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 sound scape,

it's 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 C note that has a sample,

and then I hit a D note of the same sample, it will be up a step. So for the skin, you give the... Shhh! Shhh! Shhh! Shhh! Red Graven Pinson still holds the lead. The French in third and we could do without seeing them at the moment.

In Atlanta one of 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 sound. So no matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture, you cannot reach, in isolate, sound like you do visually. But people have expectations.

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 rovers and recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event. 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. And the Australians have bitten something back from them, but not enough. Great Britain. Cold battles! Stephen Redgrade, Matthew Benson, mission accomplished.

Stand by. Off! And the racing. Good even to span. When we do our horse racing, you're not going to get somebody running around the course after the horses. There's 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 moving 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 in cursing. So basically the way you cover all that sort of stuff is to run a tape which has the sound of horses who is galloping, which is actually, if I remember rightly, a slowed down buffalo charge. That's pretty much a standard thing, and I think it's probably the same recording they've used for years. This episode of 99% Invisible is produced by Peregrine Andrews for falling tree productions and features Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston. It's an extract from the much longer and really stunning audio documentary called The Sound

of Sport. 99% Invisible is made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. To find out more, go to the website at 99%invisible.org. Music