That Good Sound
Empty seats in a stadium (image: Empty Seats by joncandy).
As Euro 2020 enters its final stages, it’s a good time to ask whether our enjoyment of football during the pandemic is being hampered or helped by crowds?
Earlier this week the England vs. Germany game at Wembley faced criticism for allowing as many as 40,000 spectators into the stadium. Given the rise of the Delta variant in the UK, Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer labelled the decision to host the match at Wembley “absolutely irresponsible”, stating that “commercial interests should not override the need to protect people from infections.”
Meanwhile the British government announced that the crowd capacity for the final, also at Wembley, would be increased to 60,000. UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin welcomed the move as “great news”, while the World Health Organisation reacted with caution. “We know that in a context of increasing transmission, large mass gatherings can act as amplifiers,” said Katie Smallwood, WHO’s senior emergency officer.
As the Euro 2020 quarter finals are kicking off tonight, we’re inclined to look back to the empty stadiums and fake crowd noise that characterised football during the initial lockdowns: a safer, but nevertheless bizarre consequence of Covid-19 safety measures. It was a topic explored by the curator and writer Natalie Kane in Disegno #27, and we’re delighted to republish her essay below.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with football. My family are all Chelsea supporters, although I was left out of football when younger because of some archaic assumptions about what hobbies women should and shouldn’t have. I grew up around it, and so would watch matches as part of life’s background noise and peripherally knew what was going on. But it wasn’t until I was older and met people who had an entirely different relationship to the game that I got it.
As I allowed myself to become more curious, I began to encounter facets of football I didn’t know existed. I ended up watching far too many interviews with Doctor Sócrates, the Brazilian medical doctor-turned-footballer who loved nothing more than discussing radical left-wing politics and philosophy over beer and cigarettes; I learned about the still hard fought-for drive for LGBTQ+ inclusion in football, the tragic suicide of Justin Fashanu (the first openly gay professional footballer), and the resultant Justin campaign; I met socialist community club fanatics; and, to cap it all off, I started supporting Tottenham Hotspur (sorry, Dad). I’d thought there was just one side of football and one type of fan – I’m glad to have been proven wrong.
“his has led to a number of technological attempts – some more imaginative than others – to preserve a degree of normality in football at a time where uncertainty seems the only constant.”
These days I tend to watch matches with people, rather than following the game as a regular, every-week-down-the-pub type of fan. I still check the scores and know how Spurs are doing, and I still enjoy reading about football, but I’ve always liked the sport most when watching collectively. As Covid-19 hit, however, it was only a matter of time before sport and live entertainment of all kinds were ordered to change. Suddenly, the thousands of voices we hear every week in the terraces were silenced, the final whistle blown. In March, all matches in England’s Premier League were postponed until 30 April, before eventually being rearranged as part of “Project Restart”. The remaining games of the 2019/2020 season were played behind closed doors from mid-June. Understandably, crowds were left out of these plans. The idea of letting thousands of people into stands was unimaginable, so clubs and broadcasters had to find ways to try and keep as much of the match-day experience intact as possible. This has led to a number of technological attempts – some more imaginative than others – to preserve a degree of normality in football at a time where uncertainty seems the only constant.
Enter EA Sports’s “atmospheric audio” – a modern box (or rather, MIDI board) of match-day tricks that is now being employed by a number of football broadcasters, most notably Sky Sports. Atmospheric audio is an automatic crowd noise generator, operated by someone sat at a desk conjuring digital voices at the touch of a button. This library of crowd sounds originated in video games. It was added to FIFA 15 in 2014 by EA Sports, having been built up from audio recorded by Sky Sports during live games, and has been used in the annual game series ever since, refreshed only once for the 2020 edition. As such, anyone who tuned into Everton’s Goodison Park stadium on Sky Sports during the pandemic heard what the broadcaster had previously captured for a video game version of Goodison Park. The sounds that you hear (although you can choose to turn them off ) are those of football past: a continuous rumble of historical voices which, at the touch of a button, can be whipped up into celebration or plunged into outrage.
“A continuous rumble of historical voices which, at the touch of a button, can be whipped up into celebration or plunged into outrage.”
Watching the 19 July Tottenham versus Leicester match (in which a 3-0 victory to Spurs saw two goals from Harry Kane – no relation, sadly – and an own goal from James Justin), I toggled the crowd sound on and off. When off, you can hear the players shouting to each other, barking instructions, encouragement and, to OFCOM’s horror, swearing. When on, all of this is lost in an immediate flood of crowd presence. Engaging atmospheric audio is the closest feeling there is to magicking people out of nothing – a wizard wheeze to make an unusual situation a little more comfortable and normal. Nevertheless, there’s something uncanny about hearing the voices of people who are no longer there; like something the sound artists Bill Fontana or Susan Philipsz might do if either were commissioned to work within a stadium. The people behind the orchestration of atmospheric audio aren’t artists, however, or don’t consider themselves as such. Rather, they are sound engineers whose job it is to remix sounds to best reproduce how they think a crowd might react. There are engineers doing this kind of work independently of atmospheric audio, too.
In an interview with Sportsbible, “crowd noise DJ” Andres Salazar (responsible for the crowd sound for DAZN’s coverage of Germany’s Bundesliga), explains how he took his own approach, owing to the fact that the Bundesliga had made all crowd noises from last season’s matches available online. Salazar samples existing crowd recordings before splicing them together to create “45 minutes of crowd singing, chanting and making noise”. He likens the process to mixing, noting the difficulty of the process: “[It’s] really hard work to get that good sound.” That good sound.
“The people behind the orchestration of atmospheric audio aren’t artists, however, or don’t consider themselves as such. Rather, they are sound engineers whose job it is to remix sounds to best reproduce how they think a crowd might react.”
That good crowd sound is something television executives have attempted to recreate before. Consider the laugh track, or Douglass track, named after its creator Charley Douglass. Invented in 1953, it was introduced to broadcasting shortly after, not, as one might think, to replace live audiences, but because audiences couldn’t be relied upon to laugh in the right way, or to laugh in the exact same way for the length of time that it takes to film a television show (a long time in the days of single channel cameras). This artificial augmentation of laughter – transforming genuine reactions into the ideal, muted but satisfying, collective laugh – was termed “sweetening” by audio engineers. It generated and sustained an industry standard of laughter: a common expectation of what good chuckling should sound like.
Douglass went on to create the Laff Box, or Audience Response Duplicator, a machine which could conjure any laugh into the world. The Laff Box was designed to fill the void that might arise when a studio audience didn’t respond exactly as desired – much like the EA Sports MIDI board, but with more cranks and levers. At around 2ft- tall, and looking like an organ and a typewriter had a fight, the Laff Box contained 320 laughs, including a 30-second “titter track” of people laughing quietly, children’s laughs, and the occasional well-placed belly laugh. Like match- day sound engineers at Sky Sports pressing the correct “Ooh” on a touch pad, Douglass sensed the right call to make based on what was in front of him and then set his machine in motion. Not everyone was a fan, however, and many found its trickery disarming and fraudulent. One of my favourite stories comes from Larry Gelbalt, co-creator of the Korean War comedy M*A*S*H, who noticed the absurdity of inserting laughter into certain situations. “[Our] show was a film show – supposedly shot in the middle of Korea,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “So the question I always asked the network was, ‘Who are these laughing people? Where did they come from?’” These debates around the uncanniness of designed audience responses are not dissimilar to those now swirling around football.
The sound collages created by Salazar or the sound engineers at Sky Sports seem intended to construct a sense of normalcy and nostalgia – something we’re keen to preserve at this present time. The good sound that Salazar finds is one that is warm, consistent, familiar, unsurprising, and which provides a sense of certainty at a time when uncertainty reigns. Nostalgia frequently misrepresents, however, and there’s much about football that isn’t romantic. In compiling their audio banks, do the sound engineers have to go through and remove the swearing, the racism? The referee’s a wanker?
“The sound collages created by Salazar or the sound engineers at Sky Sports seem intended to construct a sense of normalcy and nostalgia – something we’re keen to preserve at this present time. ”
In a blog post titled ‘You’re Not Singing Any More: Watching Football in the Wake of Covid-19’, the author Juliet Jacques writes beautifully about her experience of watching these carefully soundtracked matches as a long-time Norwich City fan. Jacques describes the “total alienation” she feels in response to how engineers have tried, and failed, to replicate the match-day experience she understood from many years watching both at home and pitch-side. “I just note that whoever is creating the soundtrack has it all wrong,” she writes. “[Three] down with ten minutes to go, the crowd noises would not be unified chants of On the Ball City but grumbles, boos and the thud of seats flipping up as people fucked off down the pub.”
This gets to the problem of what goes wrong when design tries to emulate a collective experience that is so delicately organic. While televised sport has always undergone a level of behind-the-scenes augmentation before being beamed to people’s homes, this has never previously amounted to one person building an experience for the many out of moments stolen from a collective past. This new development, ultimately, comes down to football as a business. As much as there may be a romanticism around “the beautiful game”, so too is there financial anxiety around maintaining audience engagement to help ease the return of crowds when, and if, stadiums reopen. The days when ticket sales alone kept the lights on at Premier League clubs may have been long gone even before Covid – only 19 per cent of Man Utd’s £627m turnover in 2018/19 was match-day revenue – but there’s a worry that if fans don’t see themselves in the stands anymore, they won’t feel part of the club and will begin to drift away. After all, a club is nothing without its fans (and their financial support).
“While televised sport has always undergone a level of behind-the-scenes augmentation before being beamed to people’s homes, this has never previously amounted to one person building an experience for the many out of moments stolen from a collective past.”
In one of the more technologically ambitious attempts at fan engagement, Danish Superliga team AGF Aarhus decided to create a “virtual grandstand” for their derby match against Randers. The club invited 10,000 fans to log in through Zoom to watch the match “together”, placing large video screens around the pitch to project streams of their faces at inhuman proportion, gawping lovingly at their favourite midfielder. In the centre of the stands, a five-by- five Zoom grid replaced the usual raked seating.
As with all Zoom calls, the chaos gods ruled. Each fan could choose the angle of their camera and backlighting, which inevitably meant that some were barely legible and looked more like anonymous witnesses giving testimony than die-hard fans lending their support. Getting up to make a cup of tea or taking a beer from the fridge left behind an empty screen, although presumably some level of VJ-ing was happening to prevent any less-than-desirable spectatorship. Pre-recorded crowd sound was piped in for the majority of the match, although the fans were unmuted when goals were scored. A game attempt, then, particularly when you consider that Zoom has some buggy features concerning unavoidable latency connection issues which affect any attempt at collective sound making. Have you ever tried singing Happy Birthday with more than two people to someone on Zoom?
Other issues emerge with this kind of strategy, not least that digital technologies have seen people develop a different relationship to spectatorship (don’t pretend that you haven’t spent more time looking at yourself on a video call than those you’re in the meeting with). Deindividuation, for instance, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in large groups and which describes the way an individual can lose themselves in a crowd. In a football context, it’s what may make you feel able to shout your loudest for the striker to GET IT IN FOR GOD’S SAKE GET IT IN, despite normally being a shy and retiring type. In darker moments, it emboldens those with racist inclinations to feel incensed enough to express these thoughts and get away with it. When our presence as fans is suddenly broadcast, will we become kinder, and anxiously aware of being watched? Or will a whole different pattern of behaviours emerge?
““There’s a lot of processing that would need to be done to get to the ‘normal’ we’d expect.””
So far, most of football’s design interventions have been for the benefit of the crowd at home. But what about those on the pitch – don’t they deserve something specifically for them? Yamaha is currently in the process of developing Remote Cheerer, an app that would let fans chant remotely and specify exactly which section of the stadium they want their voices to appear from. Aside from representing a moderator’s nightmare, this technology may be hindered by the fact that the sound would be coming from many different rooms, rather than being generated in the single space of the stadium. “If I’m shouting into a microphone in a room, it captures the audio dynamics of the room I’m in, so you trap that unique sound signature,” says Wesley Goatley, a sound artist and researcher who looks at the use of audio interactions in connected technology such as the Amazon Echo. It is research that has led Goatley to explore anxieties around sound and our social and behavioural relations to it. According to him, the Remote Cheerer may trigger further alienation. “The acoustic reverberation that’s played in the stadium itself would be different than if the voice was really there, so you’d have to normalise every voice for it to sound ‘normal’,” he says. “There’s a lot of processing that would need to be done to get to the ‘normal’ we’d expect.”
Of course, there are other options to change the dynamic within a stadium. In exchange for a charity donation, German club Borussia Monchengladbach has offered its fans the opportunity to fill a seat in their Borussia-Park stadium with a cardboard cut-out of whomever they choose to represent them during matches. This has meant that alongside cardboard human fans, there are now a few hundred human-sized cardboard dogs but, hey, who’s complaining. It’s certainly better than the offering from FC Seoul, whose management quickly regretted its decision to fill the stadium with two dozen life-size “real love dolls” emblazoned with adverts for a sex toy retailer – the club was slapped with a 100m won (£67,000) fine. FC Seoul, in their defence to league officials, claimed not to have known that these particular guests were sex toys.
“FC Seoul, in their defence to league officials, claimed not to have known that these particular guests were sex toys.”
Clubs seem to go to such extremes because a community can make or break a team. While not every club has the budget of a Premier League outfit, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t meaningfully engage with fans during the era of physical distancing. Cork City FC (CCFC), for instance, is a supporter-owned League of Ireland team – the kind of club that is worth paying attention to, because their community ownership model enables some of the game’s greatest progress. Alongside regular Zoom quizzes led by volunteers and supported by staff whose skillsets were diverted, CCFC discovered that one of their die-hard fans, Trevor Carey, had a treasure trove of historical material from the club’s past: hundreds of hours of taped matches that he’d driven up and down the country to collect. Using this archive, CCFC gave fans the opportunity to sign up to watch around four matches a month through Patreon, with proceeds going to support the club. At 7.45pm on their usual match day, CCFC fans instead watched highlights from the past, following along on Twitter with commentators from the club. The whole project was fan-instigated and fan-led, with CCFC facilitating and lending resources where they could. There’s giving in to nostalgia and then there’s doing something fun with fans who love the club. No fancy apps, no Zoom screens, no sex dolls.
Football was one of the first pillars of entertainment to be brought back as lockdowns eased, with many players voicing concerns about it happening too soon. In his 17 May column for The Sunday Times, Derby captain Wayne Rooney wrote, “The concern is not so much for ourselves, like whether you might pick up an injury, but more about bringing coronavirus home and infecting those around us. People’s lives are at risk.” However, guidance soon changed as June came around and play swiftly resumed, albeit behind closed doors and with Covid compliance officers joining the coaching staffs. Nonetheless, it remains hard to imagine thousands of bodies congregating again, celebrating, hugging, and touching each other. There’s a whole other essay to be written about how stands will have to change, for instance. Their current design is akin to a sardine tin and changing that would be a mammoth task, requiring wide-reaching architectural reimagining.
“The concern is not so much for ourselves, like whether you might pick up an injury, but more about bringing coronavirus home and infecting those around us. People’s lives are at risk.”
So many of the design responses by clubs have centred on trying to instil a sense of what we’ll be able to return to when all of this is over. But in trying to retain a sense of normalcy, an uncanny football dream state has been conjured – one that sounds, and sometimes even looks, like something we recognise, but which isn’t really the same thing at all. The harsh reality that I, and perhaps many other fans, have not quite come to terms with is that football isn’t going to be the same – not for a long time yet. Design, as a discipline, as a philosophy (or whatever we’re calling it these days), wants so desperately to provide solutions, but to so many football represents a community, a coming-together, and a signal of everyday life humming along. Of course it’s a multimillion pound venture too, and it has severe exclusionary problems, but let’s not be a snob about it: football is something that means an awful lot to an awful lot of people because of how it brings them together. It’s going to be very hard to design for that without considering the voices of the many, who are used to being so very, very close together.
Words Natalie Kane
This article was originally published in Disegno #27. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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