soundequipment-blog reblogged
When the London 2012 Olympics begin in a couple of weeks, a menagerie of sports will take over the world’s TV screens. Tens of millions of people will watch archery, diving, and rowing.
Or at least we call it watching.
Really, there are two channels of information emanating from your flat screen: the pictures and the sound. What you see depends, in part, on what you hear. To be immersed in a performance on the uneven bars, we need to hear the slap of hands on wood and the bar’s flexing as the athlete twirls. Watching sports on mute is like eating an orange when you have a stuffy nose.
A massive sporting extravaganza like the Olympics requires massive media production. The television broadcasts from the Olympics aren’t merely an act of capturing reality, but an act of creation. TV sporting events are something we make, and they have a tension at their core: On the one hand, we want to feel as if we watched from the stands, but on the other, we want a fidelity and intimacy that is better than any in-person spectating could be. Our desire is for the presentation of real life to actually be better than real life.
Read more. [Image: Reuters, edited by Alexis Madrigal]
Source: The Atlantic
