Sounding Out the Olympics

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.