the sound of sport - BBC radio documentary

[Angstrom]

This is a fascinating nerdy documentary about how sport sound is captured and emulated. It's pretty ambient listening, filled with nice recordings and BBC engineers talking about dynamic range. So if you like that sort of thing, you'll like this.

In some cases the sounds you hear are not what you think, for BBC horse racing (for instance) there is a guy playing a sampler filled with Buffalo stampede sounds !

A lot of sports where there is a large distance involved, such as skiing, the audio engineer has no way of matching the audio that modern audiences expect from games and movies. So they use samplers again!
Even for darts. They trigger a sampler filled with kick drums from the actual dart sound, to give variation.

Amazing stuff.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b010r7cl

If you are outside the UK you may need to use some sort of iPlayer proxy thing to trick them into playing it for you. I have no idea about this, but I'm sure the interwebz can help.

[Jan Holm]

Thank you - loving this.

"some might say that 284 microphones for a bobsleigh
race is a bit excessive"

[anybody human]

Interesting, good find. Thanks for linking

[photonal]

Thank you - loving this.

"some might say that 284 microphones for a bobsleigh
race is a bit excessive"

Yeah why don't they just either

i) fix a single audio field recorder onto the bobsleigh itself (ok, the participants might complain about the mic adding additional drag to the air dynamics...)

or

ii) have a fly-by-wire mic following the bobsleigh down the run?