Sport is slowly returning, but there’s something missing. Without fans, the experience is somehow lacking. In the German Bundesliga, dramatic late goals are met with sporadic clapping and echoing, distant wails of delight. As country after country eases lockdown restrictions, we’re all getting used to a new kind of sport: one that lacks the intensity and drama of the spectacle played out in front of thousands of baying supporters.
The reason why we find sport without crowd noise so unnerving is clear, says Glenn Cummins, an associate professor at Texas Tech University who has researched the effect of crowd noise on viewing audiences.
He says that audiences rely on the social cues from spectators in the stadium to help make inferences on what is happening on the field. In a study he conducted into spectator crowd noise, participants were asked to continuously rate how exciting they found a sport broadcast was when it had an enhanced crowd response. “What we found was that people would follow those enhanced audio cues. As the crowd swelled, they rated the competition as more exciting,” he explains.
Crowd noise also provides audio cues which remind audiences to return their attention to the game, when they’re otherwise distracted by their phone. “When we hear the crowd start to swell, we recognise that something must be happening. And I should allocate my attention back to the game and be less distracted and watch the goal that's about to happen,” Cummins says.
Pandemic-hit sports broadcasters are desperate for the return of live sport to be a success, so they’re trying everything to make games behind closed doors as engaging as possible and recreate the fan experience. For many, the answer lies in artificially-created crowd noise, and sports across the globe are currently considering the use of it.
Last week, Sky Sports announced that when the Premier League returns on June 17, viewers will be able to watch the remaining games with the addition of team-specific crowd noises and chants made in collaboration with EA Sports’ FIFA video game. The broadcaster has also added a new ‘video room’ to the Sky Sports app which will let friends chat during the match. People will also be able to vote for their favourite chants. “The chant with the highest votes will be broadcast on a ‘watchalong’ feed on one of the main sports channels, that will also have additional polls and predictions on screen,” says David Gibbs, director of content and advertising products at Sky.
Sky Sports isn’t the first broadcaster to implement artificial crowd noise into its broadcasts, however. Before the National Rugby League in Australia was suspended back in March, one round was played without crowds in attendance. While it provided the empty stadium with an interesting soundscape, Joe Bromham, executive producer at Fox Sports Australia says that “It felt exactly that, empty.
Knowing that crowds wouldn’t be back for some time, Fox Sports Australia began thinking about how it could make the stadium sound less empty, and started experimenting with sound. It cut two clips, one with crowd effects and one without. “The difference was so stark we knew we had to work on replicating that virtual audio for live games,” Bromham says. Partnering with post-production company NEP, they built a program that houses 60 different sound beds and audio effects to accompany the game. In the back room, there’s a virtual audio director who controls the intensity of the main bed of crowd effects on a tablet, and they control the intensity of the mix by moving their finger around the screen.
If a player scores a try, all the virtual audio director needs to do is move their finger into the try area on the tablet and the crowd sound for a try will be generated. “A senior producer sits with the virtual audio director and directs the intensity based on what is happening in the game. Big hit – cue the roars and claps. Dropped ball – cue the frustrated fans,” Bromham says. The team at Fox have gone as far as to create sound beds that are unique to venues and clubs. The Gold Coast Titans rugby team has a fan that beats a drum throughout the entirety of the game, for example, while the Melbourne Storm rugby team has a fan with a cow bell.
For the Bundesliga, Sky Deutschland’s audio engineers took the audio from the last game played by the two competing teams, and mixed it with the audio being played live. Like Fox, Sky Deutschland created audio samples for specific sounds, such as goals, penalties, fouls and decisions. In recent weeks, Bundesliga clubs have been piping crowd noise into the stadium sound system itself.
Sport pundits have praised the addition – commentator Jacqui Oatley said she was getting a weird adrenaline rush from the broadcasted crowd noise. But the implementation of artificial crowd noise has divided fans, however. Some have called it just odd, and others are muting the TV because they dislike it so much.
Individual teams and tech companies are trying to create crowd noise that is more authentic, with some clubs and companies mixing in actual living room sound, as well as building in fan experiences into the game.
The Danish football league was one of the first professional football leagues to return to TV screens on May 28. Before its return, local team AGF Aarhus knew it wanted to give fans a stadium-like experience when the sport came back, even if those fans weren’t able to physically attend the match. Inspired by the internal Zoom video conference calls the football club were having prior to a resumption of play, AGF’s head of media Soren Carlsen investigated upscaling the video conferencing technology so that 10,000 fans would be able to login to a Zoom meeting at one time and be at the stadium together.
When fans registered for a virtual ticket to the match, they were able to choose an actual seat number. They were then organised into meeting rooms based on their chosen seat, making the idea of being in the same block as other fans more realistic. On its opening fixture, a giant 40-metre-long screen was erected in front of one of AGF’s stadium stands; fans’ faces from the Zoom call were reflected on the giant screen. “Audio was our main concern. Imagine you have a meeting with thousands of people and they all turn on their microphone,” says Carlsen. “There's just noise, just white noise,” so the team decided to use pre-recorded sound from prior games, but mix it in with the sound from fans in the Zoom meeting.
One issue with streaming fan audio is the delay from living room sound to TV or live stream broadcast, with people at home seeing a goal being scored at differing times. So instead of cheers, Carlsen says that they encouraged those in the Zoom meeting to sing a song, so that the audio wouldn’t be out of sync. “It’s using a technology to recreate some very human emotions that we are missing right now. We are missing the community, we are missing the camaraderie,” Carlsen says. “And this is one way you can try to at least have a sense of this feeling.”
There are also startups trying to help bring audiences into the stadium. Canadian startup ChampTrax has built an app to help leagues get around the problem of living room sound turning into pure white noise. ChampTrax founder Elias Andersen says that the HearMeCheer app captures sound from fans using their phone’s microphone, and aggregates this into one audio stream so that each fan’s audio sounds distinct. In case broadcasters fear fans might start trolling, the company claims it has made it difficult for inappropriate fans to ruin the broadcast – 15 per cent of those using the app would need to chant the same thing at the same time for it to be heard clearly on the broadcast.
It's not just audio missing from the experience. To make sporting events feel less artificial, broadcasters are looking at closer camera shots so that less of the seats can be seen. Iceland-based OzSports, is aiming to use augmented reality to beam avatars of fans into empty seats in the stadium for those watching from home.
CEO Gudjon Gudjonsson says that the company does this by installing its augmentation system onto broadcasters’ cameras to simulate the effect. It works in combination with an app that lets fans watching from home create an avatar of themselves, dress themselves in their favourite team’s clothes and face paint, and register a ticket in their favourite seat in the stadium.
When broadcasters combine clever crowd noise simulation with smart camera shots and angles that bring the viewer closer to the action, the watching experience can become a whole lot less weird. If viewers aren’t closely scrutinising the broadcast, then it could become an effective enhancement.
“I think it is a bit more jarring when we are constantly reminded that the stadium is empty, that this is not natural. That creates a tension,” says Cummins. “As we see more of this, we're going to see perhaps some differences in in how the broadcast is shown to us so that we're not seeing those reminders of an empty stadium. As long as we don't do that it's easy to surrender to this illusion that life is normal again.”
Alex Lee is a writer for WIRED. He tweets from @1AlexL
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
