Live sports are back, and networks are trying different approaches to the audio generated by events without fans present.
On Saturday, NBC will try something new with the broadcast of the Belmont Stakes. Usually the third jewel of the Triple Crown, the Belmont will be the first major horse race during the pandemic.
There will be no fans at the 90,000-seat venue, and NBC will use seven cameras instead of 25. And three jockeys will be wearing microphones.
The goal is to capture the sounds of racing, a loud and raucous exercise that surely makes it impossible to hear anything the jockeys may be saying to each other. But the concept underscores the fact that football games generate plenty of compelling sounds that could be, and maybe should be, captured by microphones at games without fans.
Teams and coaches won’t want to do it. The league won’t want to do it. It will be impossible to properly dump profanity in real time, as the folks at Good Morning America once learned during a live Green Day concert.
The answer may lie in the way ESPN presented The Last Dance. The main feed on an FCC-regulated three-letter network wouldn’t have ambient audio, and a companion broadcast on a cable channel would, with every word captured by the microphones coming through the TV.
Again, coaches will be concerned about the strategic impact, given that anything said can and will be used against them. But if the league is looking for ways to add value to TV rights, the pandemic is presenting a golden opportunity to coax more golden eggs from the goose, by letting fans hear things they’ve never heard before.
John Madden recently told Sunday Night Football executive producer Fred Gaudelli that the natural sounds of the game should be embraced.
“‘Fred, you’re going to hear things that even you have never heard,’” Madden told Gaudelli, “‘so I’d be really trying to figure out how to best capture those sounds, and present them to the audience and not worry as much about artificial sound.’”
