SOUNDS LIKE A TOUGH JOB!
They are football’s new conductors, picking from 40 noises to add atmosphere to fanless games, but should they be booing teams off?
IT IS 15 minutes to kick-off in the match that will crown Liverpool’s season and in a booth the size of a large broom cupboard i n west London, sound engineer Adam Peri is making a final check on the buttons with which he will attempt to create the sense of a broiling, passionate, historic night at Anfield.
Each of the options — ‘ goal’, ‘miss’, ‘angry’ and ‘whistle’ as well as ‘clap’, ‘anticipation’, ‘home’ and ‘away’ — are distinguishable by his own hand-written labels, though there’s nothing homespun about the process of providing football’s new soundtrack: ‘audio augmentation’ as they call it in the industry.
The look in Peri’s eyes shows he is extremely aware of the very public part he is about to play in Liverpool versus Chelsea, at the other end of the last 30-second pre-match ad. Some last-minute instructions from senior producer Billy McGinty are communicated through the studio speakers and he is off — plunged into the task of predicting each tackle, foul, miss, fine pass or goal fractionally before it happens, so the appropriate fan reaction will arrive in synchrony.
He has his hands full. The fingers of his right hand hover over a dozen or so illuminated buttons on a square midi box. A cursory glance at this box is all that he has time for when the moment comes.
The brightness of the buttons is graded to help differentiate in his peripheral vision between strong and mild applause, t ap- i n or world-class goal.
‘It’s like driving a car,’ says Peri. ‘You can’t really take too long to look down at the gear stick and think, “I’d better go from first to second”. You have to be confident. Instinctively know where your goal and miss triggers are. It’s so obvious if we stuff up our timings.’
His left hand hovers over a mixing console of the kind DJs use, where he applies volume to the sound he has selected — and also introduces chanting, clapping and mounting anticipation. The early Anfield sounds are benign. A bed of generic fan noise as the players walk out and some of the club-specific chanting. But he is rapidly entranced in the game’s twists and turns as he searches for instinctive fan response. ‘ Oh wow, oh yes, well done,’ he says, as Sadio Mane skips through Chelsea’s defence, then triggers the strongest available goal response just before he scores.
Trent Alexander-Arnold’ s free-kick for 2-0 is another clean, quick intervention. ‘A free-kick like that’s going to be a goal or a miss and either way it’s going to be the most intense of those two sounds. You can be ready,’ says Peri.
Perils lurk. It is harder to judge a tackle on screen than in the stadium. ‘That’s a bad one,’ Peri says. But Willian’s challenge is clean and an initial whistle of indignation is tamped down.
THE team of six Sky sound engineers plunged into this work find the drinks break a godsend and this game is more intense than most. A handball just before Gini Wijnaldum makes it 3- 0 means howls of indignation have to morph into celebration. ‘Difficult one, so much going on in there.’
The ultimate fear is making a mistake which is impossible to disguise. ‘For one Man United shot on goal, I accidentally triggered the whistle sound,’ says Peri.
‘So the crowd have started whistling and it’s like, “Why would they do that?” If it had been a goal I would have been in a bit of trouble.’
Goalkeepers defying expectation, rendering a goal sound inappropriate, are another problem.
‘There’s a get-out-of jail card for that,’ says Peri. ‘If you are quick enough you can bring down the level of that goal sound on the fader and trigger a miss sound and actually cover up that goal reaction. The great thing about it is it does sound like how the fans would react. “Yeehh… ooohh”.’
This entire process has been controversial; something programme directors knew carried the risk of appearing fake or dehumanising the fans who are the essence of live sport.
But as soon as BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh viewed Schalke v Dortmund — the first Bundesliga game back — without artificial sound, he felt that the option was needed.
talkSPORT has also provided augmented sound, in a way that the BBC have not, with the fan-free alternative on its website. ‘Those games in the raw, without fan sound, offer something very distinctive,’ says the station’s head, Lee Clayton.
‘ Mikel Arteta swears at his pl ayers i n multiple di f f erent languages. But radio is so much about moments and cadences that attract your attention. A change in the noise of the crowd, just like the commentator’s change of pitch, denotes that. They build anticipation towards an impact point. We felt it so important to keep that.’
Sounds for all three broadcasters have been provided by EA Sports, from the hundreds of sound files generated for its Football Manager game. But the Sky sound engineers felt the initial range made available — 40 in all — was far too big. ‘In that split second, you can’t decide “Oh, that’s the medium, medium soft goal reaction”,’ says Peri.
Jeers are the most contentious point. Sky had Norwich leaving the field to moderate boos from their own fans after a 3-0 home defeat by Southampton and BT Sport had more of the same last weekend after the 4-0 defeat by West Ham. Sky also had a rendition of the ironic ‘ Leeds are falling apart’ chant, sung by their own fans, when they went behind to Luton. The clubs were not happy.
All broadcasters are preparing to continue with the facility into the new season and at Sky, where about 80 per cent of viewers are selecting augmented sound.
Peri will be at the controls today for Leicester v Manchester United and Swansea v Brentford in the Championship play- offs. ‘ It’s a strange feeling, being this conductor of sounds,’ he says. There are other words for it. At Anfield, those 90 minutes of football meant at least 100 split-second decisions.