Sound Down Under: Fox Sports Australia Preps Audio for Live Sports in Empty Venues Music helps fill the silence and pump up the players after a score By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - 10:30 am
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The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon that has shut down sports pretty much everywhere. And just as many civil and governmental responses have been mostly local - U.S. efforts have been led largely by state governors, for instance - regional sports broadcasters are wrestling with how to help get sports back on television. Without fans in the stands, audio poses a major challenge.
Fox Sports Australia has been working on the issue as it applies to rugby, first tackling the situation's most central question: should crowd sounds be inserted into live sports programs? Here, Antony Koveos, head of audio, Fox Sports Australia, relates his staff's efforts around the issue, readying the network for the recommencement of the National Rugby League (NRL) on May 28, without fans present in the stadiums.
Fox Sports Australia's Antony Koveos: Everyone is physically isolated, but we are all watching this match together. We are currently working with partners looking at ways to capture home-fan audio and curate it into some workable presentable playback.
What was the consensus around inserting crowd sound into shows?
That was the first question, and, early in the week, we all said, Yes, let's run some clean crowd atmosphere through the PA system in the stadium to give it something. However, by the time we got to showtime, we all agreed it was going to sound rather silly considering the seats were going to be empty. Fake crowd = hollow emotional connection. The first points scored in the first match without a crowd [were] surreal to say the least. The players were pumped having scored, but the deadly silence hit them like a frying pan: there was no roar from the fans! A few hands went up for a high five and quickly limped down, as there was no communal affirmation. That was the moment we all realized how big the vacuum was.
How do you decide to punctuate the various emotional cues and create an acceptable atmosphere for the viewers at home and the players on the field?
Fast forward 24 hours, and we had developed a stadium PA-playback policy. We sat down with the stadium PA and playback operators and went through the various states of match day. Every state had a type of music associated with it and played back at a particular level.
In the pre-match window, we got them to run some low-level bubble tracks, pump it up as the teams hit the field, and eventually fade out on kickoff. The music is pumped through the PA, and our effects microphones pick it up as reverberant reflections. During match play, the PA fades out, which allows us to extract some decent field-of-play effects, as, for the first time in history, we are not competing with the crowd. When there is a break in play, the PA plays some low-level bubble to cover the emptiness, nothing during match play, and, as soon as someone scores from either team, the PA will play upbeat motivational celebratory music at 100%. So the music from the PA becomes the de facto crowd. It works for the players in the stadium; it works for the audience at home.
How has the broadcast mix changed?
For starters, the field-of-play effects are fantastic. The stadium has now become like a Foley studio, and you can pick up a lot of good effects, [and] impact sports allow you to hear various levels of contact. Traditionally, we would only hear the big hits; now we can hear the ball touching the hand, minor scuffles, and the stomping of the feet. In ball-kicking sports like soccer, we would hear every kick, which isn't always possible when fans are chanting and playing drums.
[We are also] hearing more player communication: all the yelling and calling in back play is easily picked up. However, we have to be mindful of foul language coming off the field of play and the bench. We alerted the sporting bodies heading into this that we would hear this much clearer, and a directive went out to all the teams to be mindful of their language.
We also made a point to pause the commentary during match play and absorb the sounds as they come off the field, as this [provides] a new insight into the game. We further added our own replay music, and we picked up selected fans at home through video-conferencing apps and recorded their reactions, including audio, and replayed these into the replay sequence. We did get some live applause from the reserve players that sat in the lower parts of the stands. It was like junior-league applause on a Tier 1 sport.
Any changes with microphone placement?
The main camera deck is now an unwanted noise source - you can clearly hear the camera operators talking - so the crowd microphones had to move from there. The crowd microphones now become [reflected-sound] microphones: non-specific wide ambience. We find spots for them to pick up reflections of whatever noise there is. In most venues, this ends up being down low, pointing up into the stand and the roof.
All other microphones stay the same except for interviews. In order to maintain social distancing, we set up an interview position with a shotgun microphone on a microphone stand for the person being interviewed. Our reporter has the stick mic, is standing back with the crew, and asks the questions. The interviewee stands 6 ft. in front of the camera and answers down the shotgun microphone. For remote interviews, we run a mix-minus return feed into a powered speaker, such as a Fostex 6301, which allows the studio to talk to the player or coaching staff - no headphone, no earpieces, no touching - and it worked well. All other broadcasters, including radio, followed our lead on this, and it's
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Sound Down Under: Fox Sports Australia Preps Audio for Live Sports in Empty Venues Music helps fill the silence and pump up the players after a score By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
