Sounding Out the Olympics
In this interesting story from NPR — also covered on The Colbert Report last week — you can hear how Dennis Baxter, sound engineer for the Olympics, makes the games sound “real.” Since mics can’t easily pick up sounds from distant events in noisy arenas, Baxter augments the video with audio:
“Some people think it’s cheating. I don’t think I’m cheating anybody,” he says. “The sound is there. It is the exact sound. It’s just not necessarily real time. Because of the laws of physics, you’ve got one noise masking another noise. So … when you see a rower, your mind thinks you should hear the rower and that’s what we deliver.”
The confluence of liveness and authenticity in audio recordings particularly interests me here. Check out the NPR story above to hear some examples.
I tuned into the US/Tunisia basketball game a few days ago through NBC’s web stream but was totally disoriented by the sound. All the sounds of the game were there, but no announcers. I’m so used to commentators (disembodied as they usually are) yet it still took me a few minutes to realize the “problem.” When I think about it, it’s a bit strange that the naturalized sound world of so called live sports on TV included acousmatic voices and that their LACK would be disorienting. Talk about a confluence of liveness and authenticity!
This also reminds me of a story I heard a few years ago about TV producers pumping in bird noises during a golf broadcast. If memory serves, the farse was revealed when a birder noted that the bird sounds were from the wrong region. That’s what I call active listening.