Micah Loewinger: Hey, this is Micah Loewinger, and you're listening to the On The Media Mid-Week 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 sleek, all the camera angles, the slo-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.

[background noise]

Micah Loewinger: Or the creeks of the uneven bars.

[background noise]

Micah Loewinger: That satisfying thump when the gymnast lands on the mat at the end of her routine.

[cheers]

Micah Loewinger: 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.

[background noise]

[music]

Dennis Baxter: I like listening to sports.

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: I can close my eyes, I can hear every single one in my head.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: It's my belief that people have ingrained them a memory of certain sounds, and if that sound is not fulfilled, then the mind knows that there's something wrong.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: There is an expectation of what football sounds like, and it certainly wasn't--

News clip: Vuvuzelas, the plastic horns who's noise has been driving people mad.

News clip: Just that continuous hum which actually drowned out all of the meaningful noises.

[vuvuzelas blowings]

Dennis Baxter: 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 sport should sound. This is 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.

[background noise]

News clip: They get away first time. Powell has got a very good start.

Dennis Baxter: I'm gearing up for London 2012, there's going to be a big job.

News clip: It's going to be gold for Jamaica.

Dennis Baxter: I'll be using a team of 350 sound mixers, about 600 sound technicians, and close to 4,000 microphones.

News clip: That is superb. It's a new world record.

[cheers]

[music]

Dennis Baxter: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1954. 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 a microphone and start recording her. My uncle had a restaurant and I washed an awful lot of dishes, and when I was 14 years old, I had enough money to buy a real recorder. It was around $1,000 at the time. It was a stagering sum in 1968. This is the size of a big suitcase. [chuckles]

Dennis Baxter: 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. At the end of my college degree, I had done my final papers on the 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 was 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.

[music]

News clip: We're just minutes away from the first even on the ESPN schedule.

Dennis Baxter: 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 sounds of car racing, tennis, baseball, football, whatever they sent my way.

[car racing]

News clip: Your majesty, I humbly ask you to declare the Olympic games of 1948 open.

[applause]

Dennis Baxter: That was the first Olympics to be televised by the BBC, though fewer than 100,000 homes had television at the time.

News clip: Cevona fifth and the other Swede has just passed Nankeville. It's Eriksson down towards the finish. Eriksson of Sweden won.

Dennis Baxter: As you can hear, there isn't much more than commentary to be heard.

News clip: Sixth was Bergkvist and seventh, Nankeville.

Dennis Baxter: 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. One of the first things we implemented into the Olympics was a lot more close micing. This is where you put a microphone as close as possible to the sound source.

Dennis Baxter: 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.

[background noise]

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: The parallel bars and the uneven bars for the women's gymnast, when you put the microphones that close to the athlete, you hear the flexing of the bar, you hear the breathing, you could even hear the rustling of the clothing.

[background noise]

[cheers]

[background noise]

[music]

Dennis Baxter: My dad was very anti-rock and roll, and he goes, "Okay, I'll get you a guitar," and I was just thrilled. Come Christmas morning, he got me a guitar and it was an acoustic guitar with a Chet Atkins record. 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. I stumbled across a contact microphone, which is a device, a microphone that you actually can stick right on to the top of the guitar to amplify it. It picks up the actual vibrations of the wood and consequently the sound of the guitar.

[music]

Dennis Baxter: 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 summersaults, they do all kinds of routines on top of it. I'm hearing this balance beam and I said, "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?" 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.

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: You're hearing the athlete on the bar, you're hearing depth, and the movement.

[cheers]

[background noise]

[cheers]

[background noise]

[cheers]

News clip/Umpire 1: First set, Roger Federer to serve. Ready.

News clip: The final, Wimbledon, 2008. Here we go.

News clip-Umpire 1: Play.

Dennis Baxter: In 2008, the team responsible for the sound of the Wimbledon men's final was nominated for a BAFTA Award.

Bill Whiston: 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.

[ball sounds]

Bill Whiston: That's the sound of [unintelligible 00:10:20] That hush, the bouncing of the ball on the court.

[ball sounds]

Bill Whiston: 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.

[background noise]

[applause]

News clip - Umpire 1: 40 love.

Bill Whiston: There's lots of microphones in the court. Basically, the court is covered by a very nice small stereo mic stuck on the back of the court just above the center line judge's head, so that occasionally causes an interesting moment when they shout.

[umpire announcement]

Bill Whiston: 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.

[cheers]

News clip - Umpire 1: 40-love.

Bill Whiston: You will not doubt have seen on closeups 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. Those are used these days ever since Mr. McEnroe's outburst to try and pick up anything that's interesting, then said to the umpire.

[laughter]

News clip: Crawford serves. Hines gets back and center. Crawford drives into the net, that's bad. Bad for him.

Bill Whiston: 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 got a bit of umpire on as well as the rather distant smashes of the ball.

News clip: His service puts him at such an advantage, even when Crawford gets it back, he's able to come up, and volley, and put the ball where he likes. Crawford returns the service, and it's out. Let it out.

Bill Whiston: When I'd first joined outside broadcasts, they were still doing mono. It was early '80s and I was asked to do Court 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 weather-proof microphone. Which is a beautiful stereo microphone, but really normally used for covering orchestras. Then that meant that your players were actually moving around left to right as they run around the court.

[background noise]

[applause]

News clip: 15-all.

Bill Whiston: That's now evolved to 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.

[background noise]

[applause]

News clip - Umpire 1: 30-15.

Bill Whiston: 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 got to do is time it in such 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'd like.

[cheers]

Bill Whiston: Over the years, I've managed to develop the sort of sixth sense, in a way, that I can guess pretty much now 9 times out of 10 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.

[cheers]

Bill Whiston: Of course, keeping the commentator on top of it.

News clip: That would be the right time to serve your first ace. Adam now with the second set point.

[background conversation]

Bill Whiston: What was brilliant about that particular final was that they let it breath. 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 commentator?" I think that would be something that people would really appreciate. You could add your own commentary then. [laughs]

Barry Davis: Producers 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, have been a commentator on various things.

[cheers]

Barry Davis: When a goal is scored, I would just hold my commentating, if I was producing, just for five, six seconds, wind up the sound of the crowd, and then let them come in.

[cheers]

Barry Davis: I used to try and make it 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.

[crowd singing]

Barry Davis: Euro '96 when England played Germany in the semifinal, I can remember very well, four, I would've thought, something close to 10 minutes before the teams came out, so much good sound from around the stadium. Just with a few observations of the commentator.

[crowd singing]

[cheers]

News clip: Everyone joining in. The famous, those who come to support the opposition, and those only well known to their friends.

[applause]

Barry Davis: 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.

[crowd singing]

Barry Davis: 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.

[ball sounds]

[applause]

Dennis Baxter: Personally, I don't favor the system of fixed microphones around the pitch that builders cross. 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 we use in London for the 2012 football events.

[ball sounds]

Dennis Baxter: What you're hearing now is a game from the Athens Olympics in 2004.

[ball sounds]

[background noises]

[applause]

[cheers]

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: At every Olympic games, I try to ratchet up the excitement and entertainment value. 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.

[bobsled sounds]

Dennis Baxter: In Vancouver, there were 44 cameras. At each camera position, there was a distinctly different oral perspective. I was trying to put the viewer, the listener, in the place of the athlete. I made every camera position a sound zone.

[bobsled sounds]

Dennis Baxter: 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.

[bobsled sounds]

[background noise]

Rob Knox: It's like a piece of music that if you just sit and listen to the crowd, you hear how it swells and dives and peaks, and then suddenly bursts. It sounds to me like an orchestra.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: I'm Rob Knox, 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 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. They bring me in so that they can recreate the feeling of being really into that event when you see the movie.

Movie clip: The Game of Their Lives.

Movie clip: It was the greatest team in any sport I have ever seen.

Rob Knox: The Game of Their Lives was a football movie about the 1950 US men's national soccer team that was competing in the World Cup in Rio in Brazil. 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.

[cheers]

Rob Knox: I would just move around the stadium and listen for pockets of chanting and cheering or loud fans and listening for the energy.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: They are out of their mind singing in huge 10-foot drums.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: 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'd had a handheld recorder. I'd try to not let them know I was recording, so I didn't want to change their performance.

[background noise]

[crowd chants]

Rob Knox: If you have people in the loop group, actors, they're not going to go that deep and scream like a fan and an audience will. It's amazing, when you can recreate with real people, that energy, that's the way to do a sports movie.

[background noise]

Gordon Durity: Sound puts you in the actual environment and it really does create an emotional response. My name is Gordon Durity. I am the studio audio director at Electronic Arts Canada, specifically the sports video game end of the company. We make games like FIFA, hockey, soccer, American football, golf, pretty much the entire range of sports.

[cheers]

Gordon Durity: We're taking a scientific approach to a very emotional process, which is, let's reanalyze how crowds work. Instead of this big wash of sound where everything's happening at once, gets 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. 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.

[cheers]

Gordon Durity: 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.

[whistle]

[ball sounds]

[whistles]

Gordon Durity: 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 these beehives going on.

[vuvuzela sounds]

Gordon Durity: 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. You have to have this or it's not authentic." We actually put a mute button on finally to say that you can mute it or lower the volume of it. Then when the actual World Cup started in South Africa, people were saying, "How come the TV channels can't just put a mute button like they do in the actual video game?"

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: That is another one of my favorite sports. It was 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.

News clip: ... Up. [background noise]

[water splash]

[background noise]

[music]

Dennis Baxter: 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 and you hear the bubbles. You get the complete sense of isolation and the complete sense of the athlete all alone.

[water sounds]

[horns]

[starter pistol sound]

News clip: A1.

[applause]

Dennis Baxter: 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.

[thud]

Dennis Baxter: That's a no-brainer. A little bit of the athlete as they're getting ready, but it probably goes back to the movie Robinhood. 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." The obvious thing was the sound of the arrow going through the air to the target, which did the [mimics sound] type of sound. We looked at a little thing they 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. It completely opened up the sound to something different.

[background noise]

Movie clip: 10 down, 9 points. [additional conversation]

[background noise]

Movie clip - Director 1: [background conversation]

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: For some reason, directors don't like to see the microphones. They do like hearing good sound, but there's a resistance to actually seeing microphones in the picture, which is one of the challenges that we have. The boundary microphone fulfilled that challenge because you could creep the microphone closer to the actual source.

News clip: 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's been down, he came down about a quarter of an hour ago to line up the actual stakeboats. 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.

Paul Davis: 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 it's a hidden jewel, isn't it, really? I think it's one of those things that one takes for granted because, for obvious reasons, you can't see it. When it's going great, no one 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.

Paul Davis: Oxford is rock solid, but I don't have any Cambridge, well, coming and going.

News clip: I would concur with that, yes.

Paul Davis: All right, mate. Thank you.

Andy James: My name's Andy James. I'm a sound supervisor. We're at the other boat race at Putney. My job is about augmenting what you're seeing with what you hear.

News clip: It is fine. Everything we've done will be fine.

Andy James: Okay, I've fed the big players my pre-delay. Whenever I look at a shot, I want to try and better it with the sound. That that's always my aim. Paul cuts up a really, really good shot of the crews, then 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. To make sure every shot Paul cuts up, we can match it with sound and make it even better.

Paul Davis: 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.

Andy James: 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 miced 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 rowers are reacting to it as well. Those motivational reasons for hearing sound I think is great rather than it just being wallpaper.

News clip: We're passing the boathouses now, we're just going to take the Oxford stroke. Now then. In, out. One, out. Two, out. Three, out.

News clip: That is sort of bleeding through, Georgie, but again, really good.

News clip: Mike, I'm interested. We've got three and four for the end of the coxes, but I don't have one and two audio.

Andy James: Okay. Seven boathouse. Any 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. 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 into 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.

[music]

Movie clip: The time has come.

Andy James: We start off. The first half of the program will all be a presentation element when the presenters will be introducing what's going on. Clare Balding will be with us.

Clare Balding: This is the time, their time. Good afternoon. It's just gone 3:45. We are live in the boathouse of last year's winning crew, Cambridge University.

Andy James: That's the first element and then we move into the race itself. I'm basically moving along my sound desk from left to right.

Jo: Andy, dear, are you in there?

Andy James: Just give us five minutes, Jo.

Jo: All right.

Andy James: 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.

News clip: The first stroke is so important. It has to be a good 600 more to come but the first one is the platform.

Andy James: We've got various high distant effects mics, one up on the hoist, which gives us a panoramic view of Putney.

[background noise]

Andy James: Then we move on down towards October Fader 41. By now, we're into mics in the boathouses themselves.

News clip: Oxford still not ready. Cambridge have got his box, has her hand up again.

Andy James: Then we're into the race itself, the start of the race and we've got the umpire's boat as the umpire gets the race started.

News clip - Umpire 2: Attention. Go.

[background noise]

Andy James: Then there's the Oxford and Cambridge boats themselves. There's two effects mics that hopefully pick up the sound of the rowing.

News clip - Umpire 1: Full attention now. Pull up.

Andy James: The coxes on the boats have a mic on them, a personal mic on them.

News clip - Rower 1: These strokes right full two and a half?

News clip - Rower 2: Second 20. Pass it now.

News clip - Rower 1: Get ready, fire. Boosting.

News clip - Rower 2: Go.

News clip - Rower 1: Join [crosstalk] on 40.

News clip - Rower 2: Ready 40. That's it.

News clip - Rower 1: Hold the finishes. Go. There, there, right on 40.

Andy James: Sometimes the language that comes from the cox isn't broadcastable, so we have to have an alternative to go to. On a live job like this, you've got to work out what the coxes are saying, is it transmittable? Nevertheless, what they're saying is it gives you really good information.

News clip - Rower 1: That's it.

News clip - Rower 2: Get us into it, circle now.

News clip - Rower 1: Now pull past, turn right here. Go by force. Half a length to move it. That's it, bend right now, right there, boys.

News clip - Rower 2: We're coming round the bend, boys. Sitting third of a length down. Driving onto it. Drive it on. Every seat. Every seat. Coming in for a clash on strike side again. Lock it in.

News clip - Rower 1: That's their bend running out. Right on the left 35.5.

News clip - Rower 2: That's it. This is our rhythm, boys. Keep it steady.

News clip - Rower 1: Yes, that's it, boys. Stay long on the arms. Just think about that aargh noise for 10. Think about that aargh noise. Three, go.

[background noise]

Andy James: 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 color because they're all having parties.

[background noise]

Andy James: It's about building up a multi-layered, oral picture.

News clip: Oxford then heading towards victory. It is all but certain. 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 Winter-Levy does his work again, shouting, not letting up. They will not let up, Oxford.

News clip: Kenny driving winning boat. Oxford, two and a half lengths behind. Flag's gone down. Cambridge are up one. Cambridge have won by two and a half lengths. Cambridge have won the boat race of 1933.

News clip: Cambridge still with a slightly higher stroke rate, but into the final straight they come. The pace, of course, from Oxford has dropped slightly. Hunched figures, tired, but the job is almost done.

Andy James: 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.

News clip: 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.

[cheers]

Andy James: 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.

News clip: Ladies and gentlemen, would you please stand for the national anthems?

Andy James: Covering anthems, for example, during Six Nations, and 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?

[singing]

[cheers]

Andy James: 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.

[singing]

News clip: Okay, all right.

Bill Whiston: When we do the rugby these days, we have a radio mic on the referee.

News clip: Timeout, please.

[whistle]

Bill Whiston: 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.

[laughs]

News clip: Take the hits, please, on contact. You make sure you go straight.

News clip: I have to do that, sir.

News clip: You go straight, I'll get him to take the hit. Here we are. There's your mark.

News clip: I'm going [background conversation].

News clip: Take legitimate pressure this time. Crouch.

News clip: Second, hold.

News clip: Pass.

News clip: Touch. Pause. Engage.

News clip: Two, three.

Dennis Baxter: The addition of a microphone on the rugby referee opened up another dimension.

[whistle]

Dennis Baxter: 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.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: Here's another sport that benefited hugely from this technique.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: Curling was introduced to the Olympics in, I think, 1988 when the Winter Olympics went to Calgary and the rest of the world going, "Curling? Is that curling?"

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: How are we going to make curling exciting? How are we going to introduce curling to the world? Early on, we started putting wireless microphones on the curlers.

News clip: That's all.

News clip: Oh, yes.

News clip: If he knows it, it's a pretty big pocket.

News clip: It freezes the back with nothing. Knows it.

Dennis Baxter: Their 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.

News clip: Pat the rock.

News clip: I say spin third.

News clip: Third.

News clip: Spin third.

News clip: Kalian for third voice.

News clip: Yes, third scores.

Dennis Baxter: It brings intimacy to the audience and it has really been a huge boost in the ratings and the interest in the sports.

[background noise]

[cheers]

[background noise]

Gordon Durity: 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 in this weird place where you're a spectator, but you're also an active participant. What we found with the sound is that we had to pretty much exaggerate.

[boxing sounds]

Gordon Durity: For instance, on a boxing game, we record the real boxers, but we just don't get the clean sound to get things like grunts and groans and punches and impacts. We go into a studio and sometimes we'll recreate a boxing ring to do the feet and the falls. Then what we'll do is we'll close mic. It's called a Foley ad. This is basically the people that do the footsteps and all the 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.

Gordon Durity:Then we'll get voice talent to come in and do things like all the [sniffs], boxing sniffs and all the grunts and groans. We then will do things like break celery and layer it into a body impact sound to get like a cracking rib type of sound.

[boxing sounds]

Gordon Durity: 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.

[boxing sounds]

News clip: 140.

[cheers]

Gordon Durity: 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. Similar, I got some tapes from Wimbledon as well. 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. McEnroe or the Williams sisters grunts. They have very unique shrieks and screams that tennis players do. We were actually able to pull that off the tape as well.

[screams]

Gordon Durity: I think it was Venus said, "Wow, it sounds just like me serving." It's like, well, it is exactly like you serving because it is you serving that we extracted.

[screams]

[cheers]

News clip/Umpire : 15-love.

[car sounds]

Dennis Baxter: I was doing America car racing and 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.

[car sounds]

Dennis Baxter: 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 is 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, "Okay, I've 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. My next race, when they showed the crowd, I'd start sneaking some stuff in, and when it came to the end of it, there was a very, very nice crowd swap.

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: The same producers, you get the audible voice, "This is great. This is what I want. This is what we're trying to achieve." Then a week later he found out that I'd used a sample, and then I get a call that say, "You're cheating." I'm saying, "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.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: 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. 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.

Dennis Baxter: I truly believe that whatever the tool takes to deliver a high-quality, entertaining soundscape, it's all fair game. 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 playback. 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. For the skin, it gives a shh, shh, shh, shh.

[background noise]

News clip: Rick Grave and Pinsent still hold the lead. The French in third and we could do without seeing them at the moment.

Dennis Baxter: 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. No matter how good the microphones are, you cannot capture, you cannot reach and isolate sound like you do visually.

People have expectations. If you see the rowers, they have a sound that they're expecting, so what do we do?

[water sounds]

Dennis Baxter: 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. Then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats.

News clip: The Australians have bitten something back from them, but not enough. Great Britain, gold medals, Stephen Redford, Matthew Pinsent, mission accomplished.

News clip: Stand by, and they're racing. Good even to Spach, although Victoria Sponge just dropped back to last early. First to begin on the far side as Dan Seest is up there in the early stages going fast tooo.

Bill Whiston: When we do our horse racing, you're not going to get somebody running around the course after the horses. There's no way. 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.

Bill Whiston: Basically, the way you cover all that 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.

[hooves sound]

Bill Whiston: 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. As they go through or over, hopefully, the hurdle, you actually fade this up. If you're clever at it, you vary the level a little bit so it sounds like several horses going through together.

[background noise]

Bill Whiston: That's pretty much a standard thing and I think it's probably the same recording that they've used for years.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: 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.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: 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.

[background noise]

Movie clip - Jockey: Nowell, go. Aargh.

Bill Whiston: 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.

[hooves sounds]

Rob Knox: He did kick one microphone off.

[music]

Rob Knox: 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.

[background noise]

Rob Knox: Horse racing fans, they get really crazy when they're cheering. Those people that are yelling, "Come on, come on." They're screaming at the top of their lungs and yelling.

[background noise]

News clip- Referee: 60.

Paul Davis: Darts is all about fun, so we like to have a bit of fun as well with the sound. 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 and anything else we can find. It just adds a bit of fun, really to what can get a bit repetitive.

[drum sounds]

Bill Whiston: - Referee 4: 125.

Paul Davis: 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.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: 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.

Movie Clip: Samuel L Jackson.

Samuel L. Jackson: I came to teach boys and you became men. This is our time.

Movie Clip: Coach Carter.

Rob Knox: 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 a basketball. When you bounce it, it goes bounce, ping. It 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. We were right under the net and I'm like, "No, that's not it." It just sounds like a big thud of a basketball and the reverb in the room.

Rob Knox: 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.

[ball sounds]

Rob Knox: I've always taken the approach to record the sounds documentary style, like accurate, and then I try to then find the next level up to go a 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 & Furious or Die Hard.

Gordon Durity: As we've been doing this over the years, 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. On ESPN, we told them, "Hey, we're trying to look at your broadcast model to try to capture that classic broadcast thing." 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."

Gordon Durity: 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.

[cheers]

Paul Davis: 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're 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.

[cheers]

Dennis Baxter: 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. One thing that makes me very happy is I hear that the vuvuzelas will be banned from the games.

[background noise]

Dennis Baxter: I'll leave you with one of my favorite sounds, the equestrian jumping event.

[background noise]

[cheers]

Micah Loewinger: 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 Micah Loewinger.

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