The Sound of Sport
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Hey, this is Michael Loewinger, and you're listening to the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I don't know about you, but I've been completely glued to the Olympics. I've loved the swimming, basketball, gymnastics, tennis, soccer, and volleyball. The TV production has been slick. All the camera angles, the slow-mo replays.

And the sound, so crisp, so immersive, you don't even notice it. Like the soft bounce of the tennis ball on the clay court before a serve. Or the creaks of the uneven bars. And that satisfying thump when the gymnast lands on the mat at the end of her routine. ♪

All delicately mixed with the commentary and the cheers from the crowd. The only reason I even pay attention to this stuff is because years ago, I heard this great radio documentary called The Sound of Sport, produced by Peregrine Andrews for the BBC in 2011. The piece takes us behind the scenes of several major sporting events with Dennis Baxter, a master audio engineer.

I'm so excited to share this classic character study with you. Baxter takes it from here. 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. Vuvuzelas, the plastic horns whose noise has been driving people mad. Just that continuous hum, which actually drowned out all of the meaningful noises. Ah, the sound of the World Cup in South Africa and those damn vuvuzelas. For many people, this was the first time they'd really thought about how sports should sound. 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. I'm gearing up for London 2012, and it's 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.

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 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'd just pop in with the microphone and start recording her.

My uncle had a restaurant and I washed an awful lot of dishes. When I was 14 years old, I had enough money to buy a reel-to-reel 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 recorder 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 in the studio recording things that you don't want to record and frustrated with the situation.

We're just minutes away from the first event on the ESPN schedule. In 1982, I found another and more profitable use of my 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 isn't much more than commentary to be heard. My own relationship with the Olympics began in 1992 when I was offered the first full-time job as a sound designer.

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.

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 Chet Atkins record. And I love Chet Atkins 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 a contact microphone, which is a device, a microphone, that you actually can stick right onto the top of the guitar to amplify it.

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 balance beam. I say, you know, 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. You're hearing the athlete on the bar. You're hearing the depth and the movement. ♪

First set, Roger Federer to serve. The final of Wimbledon 2008. Here we go. In 2008, the team responsible for the sound of the Wimbledon men's final 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.

I'm Bill Whiston 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. Fartilove.

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 centreline judge's head. So that occasionally causes an interesting moment when they shout. And there are other microphones dotted around the court, looking back at the crowd, above the crowd, to get a general atmosphere of the inside of the court.

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 these days ever since Mr McEnroe's outburst to try and pick up anything that's interesting and said to the umpire. Crawford serves. Lyons gets it back in the centre. Crawford drives into the net. That's bad.

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 it as well as the rather distant smashes of the ball. Crawford returns the service and it's out. Is that enough?

When I first joined Outside Broadcasts, they were still doing mono. It was early 80s and I was asked to do Chord 2 in stereo to see if we could develop a technique for doing that and came to, in the end, using quite a posh and expensive and not very weatherproof...

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. 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 recorded well, the surround really involves you in the play, if you like. It's like actually being there. 30, 15. The dynamic range, the difference between the quietest noise and the loudest noise doesn't half 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.

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. That would be the right time to serve your first ace. Nadal 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. Producers of the old school would tell a commentator to shut up. I don't think many do now.

I'm Barry Davies and for a few years I've been a commentator on various things. When a goal is scored, I would just hold my commentator if I was producing just for five or six seconds, 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, you get carried 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 from the commentator. Everyone joining in, the famous, those who've 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's going to go. Personally, I don't favour 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 it's a method I've used at the last four Olympics and will use in London for the 2012 football events. What you're hearing now is a game from the Athens Olympics in 2004. At every Olympic Games, I try to rash up 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 bobsled. 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, in the 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 Noakes. I'm a sound effects recordist for movies in Hollywood. I get hired by the movie studios to record sound 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 in to 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 was a football movie about the 1950 U.S. men's national soccer team that was competing in the World Cup in Rio, in Brazil. And they went on to beat 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 and record football crowds for the movie. In North America, we don't have football crowds that are that exciting and rambunctious.

I went to Brazil and I recorded football games. I went to Morumbi 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 minds 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.

If you have people in a loop group, you know, actors, they're not going to go that deep and scream like a fan in an audience will. It's amazing. When you can recreate with real people that energy, that's the way to do a sports movie. Sound puts you in the actual environment and it really does create an emotional response.

My name is Gordon Doherty. I am the studio audio director at Electronic 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, you know, let's reanalyze how crowds work.

Instead of this big wash of sound where everything's happening at once, there's 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. And maybe a wave starts around the stadium 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 game player 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 this beehives going on.

What is this thing? This is driving me bonkers. Can we not turn that thing off or down? He goes, no, no, this is this Vuvuzela 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?

Diving is another one of my favorite sports. It's 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 sound. It 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. We have a microphone at the bottom of the pool under the water. When the athlete goes under the water, we shift the perspective to just them and the underwater sound. You can hear the bubbles. You get the complete sense of isolation, the complete sense of the athlete all alone.

Archery. I like the sport. After hearing the coverage in Barcelona of the '92 Olympics, there were things that were missing. The easy things were there. The thud and the impact of the target.

That's a no-brainer, and 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 would be the ffff.

type of sound. So we looked at a little thing called a boundary microphone that laid 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 at 9 o'clock, 12.7, that's the first screen. A filter, 8.4. You hear it?

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. Of course, the umpire has to line up the boats first of all and get them into line and see if they're both straight. The umpire has been down. He came down about a quarter of an hour ago to line up the actual stake boats.

The engine of the launch has started up and the excitement is growing quite visibly or audibly on both sides of the river now. I wonder if you can hear them on this microphone. Well, we find ourselves on a quite glorious day down on the Thames at 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 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 the sound supervisor. We're at the boat race at Putney and my job is about augmenting what you're seeing with what you hear.

It's fine. Everything we've done has been fine. OK, I've heard you clear my pre-delay. Whenever I look at a shot, I want to try and better it with the 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...

jib at the Oxford Boathouse. 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. 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 cox,

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. Passing the boathouses now we're just going to take the Oxford stroke now then in out one out two out three out sort of bleeding through Georgie but again really I've got three and four of the Coxies but I don't have one and two okay seven boathouse and eight boathouse 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-linked 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, Claire Boulding will be with us. And this is the time, their time. Good afternoon, it's just gone a quarter to four, we are live in the boathouse 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 from... Just give us five minutes, Jo. I've got a 96-fader mixing desk here, and I'm starting from the left-hand end. I've got my commentary mics down one end. The first stroke is so important. It has to be a good 600 more to come, but the first one is the platform... We've got various high-distance effects mics, one up on the hoist, which gives a panoramic view of Putney.

Then we move on down towards Archibald Fader 41. By now we're into mics in the boathouses themselves. Then we're kind of into the race itself, the start of the race. And we've got the umpire's boat as the umpire gets the race started. Then there's the Oxford and Cambridge boats themselves. There's two effects mics that hopefully pick up the sound of the rowing.

The coxes on the boats have a mic on them, a personal mic on them. Up the tall. Second 20. Hutton, now! Get ready for our first gear change. Coming down for a nice long 40. That's it. Hold the finishes. Go! There! There, right on.

Sometimes the language that comes from the cocks 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 cocks are saying, is it transmittable, but nevertheless, what they're saying is it gives you really good information. Get into it! No!

Good, Valpoor! Yeah! Half a length to move in! That's their bend running out right here, boys! I'm gonna reach 36. - Coming down the bend, boys. Steadying third of a length down! - Nice!

Driving onto this. Drive it up. Every seat, boys. Every seat. Coming in for a clash on strike side again. Lock it in. Lock it in. That's it. This is our rhythm, boys. Keep the flow. Just think about that noise for ten. Think about that noise. Ready? Go. Three.

Then we're into the various shore sites. So there's another 15 faders 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 oral picture.

Oxford then heading towards victory it is all but certain there is Chiswick Bridge at the top of your picture and the finish line sits just before that the Brewery on the left hand side and Sam Winterlevy does his work again shouting not letting up they will not let up Oxford Cambridge are under the winning post Oxford are two lengths behind two and a half lengths behind flag's gone down Cambridge are one Cambridge have won by two and a half lengths well Cambridge have won

The boat race of 1933

As a spectator, you actually see very little of the race. You'll see the start or the finish or somewhere 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 defeat last year in 2011, the Thames belongs to Oxford...

To them, the victory, the smiles, the celebrations, the spoils, everything is theirs. And Cambridge have what is left. I think it's all about layering. With pitches, there's a degree of layering, but it's fairly clear-cut. Literally, you're cutting between pitches. With the sound, I think you can build up the layers. Would you please stand for the National Anthems?

covering anthems, for example, during Six Nations, and whether you, when you go to the anthem 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 due 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, you know, clearly they know the words but often they're not sung very well. But if you didn't hear their sounds at all, then you'd feel a bit cheated. OK, all right. When we do the rugby these days, we have a radio mic on the referee. Time on, please.

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. LAUGHTER

Take the hit please on contact you make sure you go straight you go straight. I get him to take the pit here We are there's your mark Take legitimate pressure this time crouch touch pause 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 and

I believe that is the future of sports sound. 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. Curling was introduced into the Olympics in, I think, 1988, when the Winter Olympics went to 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 wireless microphones on the curlers. Oh, yeah. If he knows it, it's a pretty big pocket. He freezes the back, we nut the nose hit. 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. Third? It's half a rock. I'd say thin third. Yeah, thin third. Okay, I'll aim for a third, boys. Yeah, third's close. It brings the intimacy to the audience, and it has really been a huge boost in the ratings and the interest in the sports. Hard! Hard, hard! Ha!

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 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 mic. It's called a foley artist. 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 of beef or whatever and just get all of the actual punch sounds, high, low, medium, hard, different angles, whatever.

Then we'll get voice talent to come in and do things like all the boxing sniffs and all the grunts and groans. And then we'll do things like break celery and layer it 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. Let's do it.

On the tennis game called Grand Slam Tennis, what I did, and this took a lot of tracking down, was try to get tapes from the French Open. And 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, you know, McEnroe or the Williams sisters, you know, grunts, they have very unique sort of shrieks 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. And it's like, well, it is exactly like you serving because it is you serving that we extracted. 15-year-old.

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, then 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 producer's screaming, I can't hear the crowd. I can't hear the crowd. It's a very basic physics issue where the sounds that I want are being masked. They're being drowned out by these cars. So I said, OK, 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'd start sneaking some stuff in. And when it came to the end of it, it was a very, very nice crowd swell.

And the same producer said, you know, you're getting the attaboys. 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 used a 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 see a crowd, you hear a crowd.

There's some sports that you just cannot capture the natural sound. Cross-country skiing, biathlon 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 even a kilometer down the course. Now, how do you replicate that sound?

Essentially, 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. It's all fair game, and that has caused some issues because I use samplers. What a sampler is, it's a keyboard. It'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 Ski Inn, it gives a "shh, shh." Redgrave and Pinson still hold 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 and isolate sound like you do visually. But people have expectations. If you see the rowers, 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 Redgrave, Matthew Benson, mission accomplished. Stand by. And they're racing.

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 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 cameraman cursing. So basically the way you cover all that sort of stuff is to run a tape which has the sound of horses' hooves galloping, which is actually, if I remember rightly, a slowed-down 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'd 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 that 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 Seabiscuit 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 gait than thoroughbreds. And I put four wireless microphones 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 mic arrays around the track and have some onboard mics.

and then have mics in the crowd and have mics on the gate. Course racing fans, they get really crazy when they're cheering. Those people are yelling, "Come on!" They're like screaming at the top of their lungs and yelling. 60! Darts is all about fun, so we like to have a bit of fun as well with the sound.

So what we do is we use the real sound of the dart hitting the board to trigger some samples and we play around with kick drums, snare drums, dustbins falling over, anything else we can find. And it just adds a bit of fun, really, to what can get a bit repetitive. 125! It's not real, but it 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. When you bounce it, it goes, bounce, ping. It kind of has this high airy ring. We did this great rim stuff, like rim slams, rim hits, net whooshes, 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 sounds documentary style, like accurate, and then I tried 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 was 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 push up the whooshes on the bats. So what they do now on broadcast is they actually zip those sounds up, meaning that when you listen to a baseball game now versus 10 years ago, you hear these big bat whooshes 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 crowd 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 sound. The challenge for me is to make sports on TV as engaging as film or video games. If we don't, we're going to lose out. But it's a 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 Vuvuzelas will be banned from the games. I leave you with one of my favorite sounds, the equestrian jumping event. Yeah!

You just heard The Sound of Sport, a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews for the BBC in 2011. Definitely catch The Big Show this weekend. It's all about the revenge of the cat ladies. You don't want to miss it. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael Loewinger.