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Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure

Research
a b
Phil Durrant & Eileen Kennedy
a
University of East London , London, U.K.
b
Centre for Scientific and Cultural Research in Sport School of
Human and Life Sciences , Roehampton University Whitelands
College , London, U.K.
Published online: 30 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Phil Durrant & Eileen Kennedy (2007) Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research,
Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 29:2, 181-194, DOI: 10.1080/01490400601160879

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 Leisure Sciences, 29: 181194, 2007
Copyright C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0149-0400 print / 1521-0588 online

DOI: 10.1080/01490400601160879

Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research

PHIL DURRANT
University of East London
London, U.K.

EILEEN KENNEDY
Centre for Scientific and Cultural Research in Sport
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School of Human and Life Sciences

Roehampton University
Whitelands College
London, U.K.

Starting from the premise that sound is an important aspect of leisure experience ne-
glected within existing research, this article presents a discussion of a creative project
to explore ways of encouraging sensitivity to sound in televised sport. We discuss a short
film, Super cfc, in which sound and image samples of televised soccer were electroni-
cally manipulated and recombined resulting in the de-familiarization of conventional-
ized audio-visual interactions. The article explores the ways that creative practice can
destabilize dominant discourses in televised sport and opening up ways for audiences
to become attuned to the capacity of sound to enrich and shape leisure activities.
[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publishers online
edition of Leisure Sciences for the following free supplementary resources: three sound
files corresponding to the three movements from Super cfc. This soundtrack may be used
in forced marriage experiments with image sequences from televised sports events.]

Keywords television, football, media, audio-visual

Back (2003) noted, Experiencing football as a fan was always as much about the
sounds of the stadium as the visual exhibition of the game itself (p. 311). Backs description
of the sensory landscape of the soccer stadium highlights the ways that leisure experiences
involve more than the visual. Attention to these experiences alert people to the importance of
the acoustic space of leisure. McLuhan (2005) pointed to the endlessness of the procession
of sounds in acoustic space, which differentiates it from visual space where only one thing
is in focus at a time. For McLuhan, attention to sound can free people from the constraints of
Western visual sequential logic. Thinking about the sonic dimensions of leisure experiences,
therefore, can help understand them differently. By taking account of the interrelationship
between sound and image in leisure experiences researchers can appreciate more fully the
sensual address of leisure activities and theorize their effect. Those leisure forms can be
reconceptualized to resist dominant meanings and begin to create critical, inclusive and
intersensory experiences. This paper discusses a short film, Super cfc, which puts these
ideas into practice.

Received 8 January 2006; accepted 1 October 2006.

Address correspondence to Dr. Eileen Kennedy, Centre for Scientific and Cultural Research in Sport, School
of Human and Life Sciences, Roehampton University, Whitelands College, Holybourne Ave., London SW15 4JD,
U.K. E-mail: e.kennedy@roehampton.ac.uk
181
 182 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

Super cfc uses electronic manipulation of the sound and image of televised soccer to
destabilize the audio-visual conventions of televised sport making the culturally accepted
logic of representation seem less obvious. It draws attention to the significance of the
soundtrack in its address to the audience. We first became aware of the importance of
sound in televised sport during the UEFA European Football Championships in 1996 (i.e.,
Euro 96). The opening sequences to the broadcasting of the event by the British commercial
television channel ITV were particularly interesting in their use of music and sound effects.
The music that accompanied the sponsors advertising sequence on ITV gradually became
identifiable as an electronic version of the hymn, Jerusalem1 which played throughout the
channels introductory visual montage and re-emerged to herald the start and finish of the
commercial breaks. Jerusalem is a musical appropriation of the first verses of William
Blakes poem, Milton, composed specifically for British patriotic purposes during the First
World War. More important, the song had not previously been associated with football.
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Some sporting use had been made of it when it was featured in the soundtrack to the film
Chariots of Fire. This association and others linked it to the English middle-class, while
soccer in the U.K. has been seen traditionally as a working-class sport (Walvin, 1975).
We considered that this anomaly could be linked to the medias role in creating the new
consumption of football (Horne, 2006, p. 32) in the 1990s, which broadened its appeal
beyond its traditional male working-class fan base (Kennedy, 2001).
Throughout ITVs coverage of Euro 96, music of various styles was used to accompany
pre-recorded sequences to indicate mood, ranging from operatic to pop and even including
yodeling. Music being played to the crowd in the stadium could be heard before play began,
and the sound of the crowd itself was constantly heard throughout the match singing,
chanting, cheering, booing and whistling. The sounds of the commentators voices were
heard over this accumulated ambient noise.
Since Euro 96, we researchers have become increasingly aware of the complexity of
the soundscape of sport in both its televised and live forms. At the same time we have been
making visual and sonic links between the experience of viewing sport and contemporary
dance. Creative work by the choreographer Simon Whitehead, a former athlete, was influ-
ential in this endeavor. Whiteheads choreography is based on the isolation of elements of
physical movements and their recontextualization. While watching soccer matches live and
on television, we began to recognize patterns of movements by the players that were remi-
niscent of repetitive sequences in contemporary dance. In a similar way we became attuned
to the everyday sounds and movements of home and leisure when Phil Durrant was commis-
sioned to create two soundtracks using recordings of environmental sounds. Microscopic
sonic fragments taken from the domestic sphere (e.g., the humming of a fridge and the boil-
ing of a kettle) were the basis for the soundscape he created to accompany Sophia Lycouriss
performance-installation Homezone (2001). Locational sounds from the seaside (including
arcade games) were part of the soundtrack for Nick Suttons play Home Movies (1999).
Phil Durrants musical techniques such as granular resynthesis2 developed during his
work with choreographers and his live music performances fed into the creation of Super
cfc. The result was a six-minute film that draws on ideas from our analysis of televised sport
and combines them with creative practice in sound composition. Super cfc comprises three
sound art sequences in which the sound and image channels of a televised soccer match are
sampled, manipulated and re-presented in an altered form. Despite taking televised sport as
its raw material, the film creates links between a myriad of leisure forms such as listening to

1
The words and music of Jerusalem can be accessed at http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/
j/e/r/jerusalem.htm.
2
Granular resynthesis is a term used for the reduction of sound to its smallest particles or grains,
which are then stretched, compressed and re-ordered by software samplers.
 Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research 183

music, watching music television, watching dance performances, and watching, playing and
listening to sport. Super cfc was produced in 2005 and publicly screened in an evening of
experimental audio-visual performance at the Red Hedgehog Gallery in Highgate, London,
U.K., on June 14, 2005.3
In this paper, we situate Super cfc in relation to previous research into sport media and
sonic culture, and discuss some of the dominant motifs in the film. Our aim is both to guide
an audience through an experimental audio-visual piece as well as to encourage sensitivity
to sound and the interaction between sound and image in everyday leisure activities. We
argue that sound has been neglected as an aspect of sensory experience that is important
for understanding the affective dimension of leisure. We propose that the approach that
Chion (1994) termed reduced listening (i.e., listening to focus on the quality of the sound
itself) should be adopted to attune people to the sonic culture of leisure. We consider that
reduced listening will enable gaining knowledge and understanding of the leisure experience
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through hearing as well as sight. The research question at the heart of our creative project is:
How can we encourage reduced listening to media sport? We further adapt Chions work to
develop a creative methodology based on the forced marriage of independently sampled and
manipulated sound and image in televised sport. We then introduce, appraise and evaluate
the resulting art work. The article concludes by suggesting that creative work such as Super
cfc can encourage an audience to reflect on the interaction between sound and image in
sport and leisure experiences.

Sound and Image in Sport Media

Roberts (2006) highlighted the transnational importance of television as a leisure activity:
thinking of leisure in terms of participation in sports, and other out of home activities
is misleading. Leisure is more typically spent less actively, at home, watching television
(p. 10). The relationship between media use and engagement with other leisure activities
has been seen as a complex one, with television watching often replacing other more public
pursuits like attending sports events (Allan, 2004; Jeffres, Neuendorf, & Atkins, 2003;
Roberts, 2006). At the same time, sport has become an increasingly significant and economic
part of television schedules, and the cost-benefits of televising sport compared with other
TV shows such as drama and documentaries remain high (Horne, 2006). The new cable,
satellite and digital television networks, in particular, use access to sports exclusives as a
strategic means of attracting subscribers (Horne).
Research focused on the production and consumption of televised sport (Bernstein,
2003; Guilianotti, 2005; Rinehart, 2004; Silk, Slack, & Amis, 2000), has pointed to its role in
the construction of gender, class, race and national identities among the audience (Hughson,
2002; Juffer, 2002; Kennedy, 2000a; Mason, 2002; OConnor & Boyle, 1993) connected
to wider cultural politics. Duncan and Hasbrook (1988) suggested that the trivialization of
female athletes in television sport amounted to a denial of power to women, which should
be challenged by sport and leisure educators. More recently, Stempel (2006) argued that
popular masculine sports are among the cultural institutions that functioned to buttress
support for war in Iraq. Stempel stated that sports are our most explicit and mythologized
public spectacles of competition, power and domination. Consequently, they are important
sites where Americans are registering, managing, and shaping the complex feelings about
their power position in the post-9/11 world (p. 82).

3
The authors would like to encourage readers to access the MP3 files of the audio sequences from
Super cfc and use them in forced marriage experiments, using Super cfcs soundtrack to replace
existing soundtracks of televised sport. If you require further information about the film please contact
the authors at supercfc@blueyonder.co.uk.
 184 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

Kinkema and Harris (1998) summarized the themes of research on televised sport as:
global, national, and local relations; race relations; gender relations; commercialization;
winning; drugs; and, violence. Studies of production aspects have evolved from simple de-
scriptions of technique to examinations of meaning-making and discussions of production
techniques in relation to social ideologies. Meanings created during the production process
are meant to be interpreted by audiences in multiple and competing ways. As Hall (1973)
observed, television programs are polysemic texts (containing many meanings), but the
range of potential meanings is not limitless. The complexity of televised sport simultane-
ously opens and restricts the ways it can be understood. The multiple layers of signification
in televised sport interact to contain its possible meanings. For example, commentary ac-
companying camera shots can reduce all the possible meanings evoked by the image alone
to one dominant interpretation. Seiter (1992) identified five channels of communication as
characteristic of television: image, graphics, voice, music and sound effects. All five chan-
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nels are constantly called into action in sport broadcasts, where the viewer is presented with
a melee of graphics, statistics, time alerts, commentators cries, pundits wisdom, players
actions and crowd reactions (Kennedy, 2000b). Mixed-genre sport shows that combine stu-
dio and live sequences like the long-running BBC sports magazine, Grandstand, exploit
the full panoply of effects and techniques that are available to contemporary broadcasters.
To reflect for a moment on televisions channels of communication, it becomes evident
that a significant amount of activity is generated through sound: the roars of the crowd, the
volume and pace of the commentators voices, the grunts of the players, the thud of the ball
being struck and all manner of musical accompaniment. Yet, in the analysis of media sport,
the visual field has received the most attention (e.g., Goodger & Goodger, 1989; Hesling,
1986; Tuggle & Owen, 1999; Von der Lippe, 2002; Wearden & Creedon, 2003). Little
consideration has been given to the sonic dimensions of televised sport. This oversight is
perhaps part of what McLuhan (1997) observed as the over-privileging of visuality at the
expense of sound: in our society . . . to be real, a thing must be visible, and preferably
constant. We must trust the eye, not the ear (p. 39). Buscombes (1975) classic essay on
the codes of televised football provides both an example of this tendency to foreground the
visual, along with his awareness that he might be missing something:

. . . at the level of the sound track . . . [these codes] do not seem nearly as important
as the image track. But here we may easily be mistaken, because the whole point
about codes . . . is that they are most often not consciously employed. Technical
practices become naturalized . . . and thus one is all too likely to be unaware that
there is any codification at all. This may well be the case with sound. (p. 24)

For a preoccupied spectator, watching television might be better understood as listening

out for something to see: the sound track serves a value-laden editing function, identifying
better than the image itself the parts of the image that are sufficiently spectacular to merit
closer attention on the part of the intermittent viewer (Altman, 1986, p. 47).
The focus on speech and commentary in the production of meaning in televised sport
acknowledges one aspect of the importance of sound. For example, Whannel (1992) points
to the complex use of shifters in the presentation of televised sport programs to make
contact with, speak to and position the audience. Presenters oscillate between uses of we,
sometimes referring to the production team in the studio and sometimes to everyone in the
nation. The viewer is, thus, variously positioned as sharing values with a wider television
community on the basis of class, race, nation, sexuality, age and gender. Rowe (2004)
discussed the conventions of televised sport commentary suggesting that at moments of
high drama, there is an unforgettable coming together of live TV sport event and its
 Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research 185

commentary, making it impossible to disentangle what happened from what was said (p.
123). Other studies have considered the significance of the audio in its capacity to contradict
the visuals. For example, Duncan and Hasbrook (1988) pointed to the way that the television
sport commentary described women as capable, strong and talented athletes participating in
an exciting sport, but the video depicted women as passive, decorative objects beautifying
a non-sport. Song lyrics are part of Wenners (2004) analysis of sport, nationalism, and
commercialization in television advertising campaigns. Yet, these studies take account only
of the semantic capacities of words to mean things, rather than the evocative potential of
sound in itself.
If the phenomenon of televised sport and the way it contributes to the construction of
social identities among its audience is to be understood fully, researchers must analyze the
audio as well as the visual. However, the analysis of sound presents a challenge because while
commentary and song lyrics can be analyzed linguistically, capturing their contribution to
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the soundscape of televised sport requires a different analytical approach. As Gilbert (2004)
observed, the most intense and significant form of verbal activity engaged in by fans at a
football match is . . . the wordless and semi-articulate cheer: an activity at once expressive
and affective, but without meaning as such (The sociality of affect: For a deconstructive
social-ism, para. 5).

Analyzing Sound: Beyond Signification

Attempts to analyze music as one component of sound have traditionally been fraught
with problems. Barthes (1977) observed that describing music without using the poorest
of linguistic categories: the adjective (p. 179) is impossible. As Bull and Back (2003)
explained, The translation of music into words is partial and always incomplete by the
very nature of the form (p. 377). Added to these problems is the necessary realization that
sound is much more than just music. McLuhan (1997) described auditory space as having
no fixed boundaries, being dynamic and always in flux, and indicated how difficult it was
to capture sound for the purposes of analysis.
Recent work in the field of sensual culture has gone beyond McLuhans (1997) stated
desire to foreground sound by pointing to the interplay of all the senses (Classen, 2005).
Classen suggested that it is necessary to consider how a society senses to explore the way it
understands. Sensual culture scholars have focused on ways of knowing that puncture the
dichotomy between sense and intellect by shifting their focus from embodiment to emplace-
ment, which is understood as the sensual interrelationship of body-mind-environment
(Howes, 2005a, p. 7). Feld (2005) argued that places have an acoustic dimension making
them as potentially reverberant as they are reflective, and ones embodied experiences and
memories of them may draw significantly on the interplay of that resounding-ness and re-
flectiveness (p. 185). The multi-directional interaction between the senses points towards
new ways of making meanings from the sensory knots of culture (Howes, 2005a, p. 9)
without trying to free the interconnecting threads. These cross-linkages between the senses
are the basis for the marketing technique described by Howes, which uses synaesthesia
to map and model them in ways that can guide the design of consumer culture. Market
researchers excavate the sensorial subconscious of the consumer by encouraging subjects
to create synaesthetic equations resulting in advertising campaigns such as Taste the Rain-
bow for Skittles candy, the Loudest Taste on Earth for Spicy Doritos corn chips and a
Gentle Whisp of Color for Chanel pastel eye color makeup (Howes, 2005b, p. 292). For
Howes, the senses are at the heart of consumer capitalism, which has increasingly sought
to engage as many senses as possible to achieve product differentiation and seduce the
consumer.
 186 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

It is possible to trace the sensory logic of late capitalism (Howes, 2005b, p. 287) in
the technological advances that have enabled auditory space to enliven the experience of
televised sport. Thompson (2004) explored the ideologies of the early days of Hollywood
sound engineers: by wiring the world for sound, they believed they were installing a
conduit to modernization (p. 201). Creating a new form of global citizenship centered on
uniformity of taste and appreciation of technological progress. More recent developments in
sound technology have been discussed by Chion (1994). Chion pointed to the significance
of Dolby noise-reduction and multi-track recording for the construction of what he called
a superfield of sound in cinema and television. The superfield is the space created in
multitrack films by ambient natural sounds, city noises, music, and other extraneous sounds.
The realist aesthetic that operates in televised sport to organize the visual images according
to a set of conventions aimed at producing transparencythe apparent portrayal of the world
as it is (Whannel, 1992, p. 94) may distract the audience from noticing the accumulated
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effect of this superfield. Nevertheless, cheers, whistles, shouts, murmurs, boos, applause,
chants and singing construct a superfield of sounds that are part of televised sport.

Listening Modes
Chion (1994) suggested that even though people are surrounded by sounds, they do not
hear them. Listening attentively, therefore, can form the basis of an approach to orienting
to the sound of televised sport. Chion considered three modes of listening. Causal listening
describes listening to identify the source of the sound or what makes the noise. In televised
sport this would mean listening to connect the sound of a whistle with the image of the referee
halting play. Semantic listening is listening to gain information about what is communicated
in the sound or what the noise means. Semantic listening to televised sport would translate
the sounds of the crowd singing into a meaningful lyric. Reduced listening, however, is
listening that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause or meaning
(Chion, p. 29). To engage in reduced listening is to listen to the sound as an end in itself,
rather than as the vehicle for something else. To listen in a reduced way to the sound of
a crowd in a televised sport broadcast is to move in and out of the content of the sound,
its source, and its meaning. The merged sound world of a large crowd with sound coming
from all sides creates a thick cloud of noise in contrast to the echoing ambience of a small
crowd, where individual voices are discernible. Chion suggested that reduced listening has
the enormous advantage of opening up our ears and sharpening our power of listening (p.
31). So, while attention to the interplay of words and images can alert people to the ways
televised sport represents and constructs social identities, so too can attention to sound. As
Chion argued, the emotional, physical, aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to
the causal explanation we attribute to it, but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture,
to its own personal vibration (p. 31). Understanding sound as an accumulation of source,
meaning and inherent quality offers the potential for a deeper understanding of leisure
experiences.

Sonic Rendering and the Effect of Sound

Chion (1994) observed how filmmakers employ sound to generate emotional effects, which
are not restricted to the auditory realm: The film spectator recognizes sounds to be truthful,
effective and fitting not so much if they reproduce what would be heard in the same situation
in reality, but they render (convey, express) the feelings associated with the situation (p.
109). Sounds render a seemingly more truthful reality even when the sound effect would
be absent in actuality. If someone were to punch you, it might not make a sound, but in
 Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research 187

Scorseses (1980) film Raging Bull, the sounds of the punches deliver the power, pace and
brutality of the boxing match rendering La Mottas experience in the ring. For Chion most
sensory experiences are not restricted to single perceptual channels. Instead, they consist
of clumps of agglomerated sensations (Chion, p. 112). When sounds are used to render
a sensation, they attract effects for which they are not especially responsible (Chion, p.
112). For example, sound renders the feel of a punch on screen by transferring a tactile
sensation into an auditory sensation.
The concept of affect is helpful for capturing the power of sound in televised sport.
Affect is not simply an emotional response, but has to do with investment, commitment and
passion. Massumi (2002) understood affect as marked by a gap between content and effect
(p. 24), while Grossberg (1992) called it the unrepresentable excess which can only be
indicated (p. 82) an embodied response which cannot be reduced to cognitive or emotional
meaning. Shouse (2005) explained that affect always precedes will and consciousness: at
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any moment, hundreds, perhaps thousands of stimuli impinge upon the human body and the
body responds by infolding them all at once and registering them as an intensity. Affect is
this intensity (para. 9). The audiences embodied reaction to a goal, for example, could be
understood in terms of the intensity of affect: the actuality of a shared physical experience,
of proximity and tactility and the transversal transmission of affective force (Gilbert, 2004,
The sociality of affect: For a deconstructive social-ism, para. 5).
Reduced listening can enable people to begin to take account of the power of the sound-
scape of televised sport to render sport affectively. Yet, the totality of sound is resistant to
textual analysis. In its dynamic and affective capacity, sound does not signify like a language
and cannot be analyzed as such. Creative analytic practice that engages with the interaction
between the sonic and visual fields can enable a critical response that foregrounds sound
in televised sport. Erlmann (2004) suggested that the auditory is deeply caught up in the
modern project and that the ear joins the eye in consolidating the fragile modern self (p.
5). As discussed previously televised sport has the capacity to help construct social identi-
ties among its audience, but the neglect of the affective power of sound in this process has
limited an understanding of the role of the senses in the address of televised sport. Listening
plays a part in the way people deal with themselves as subjects in embodied, sensory and
especially auditory ways (Erlmann, p. 5). Discussing the football crowd, Gilbert (2004)
suggested that what both binds us together and breaks us apart as human beings . . . is as
much unmeaningful, asignifying experience as any process of making common meanings
(The sociality of affect: For a deconstructive social-ism, para. 7). To understand fully how
televised sport includes some and excludes others in its community of viewers and lis-
teners, the interplay of sound and image must be taken into account. As Altman (1986)
observed, the role of televised sound is to call the intermittent spectator back to the set
(p. 50). The sound draws the audience in so that they become subject to the discourses of
television sport, a cultural theater where the values of larger society are resonated, dom-
inant social practices are legitimized and structured inequalities are reproduced (Sabo &
Jansen, 1992, pp. 1734).
To explore the complexities of the sonic dimensions of televised sport, we devised a
research question that asks how can we encourage reduced listening to the soundscape of
sport media. We created Super cfc to encourage sensitivity to the intertwining of aurality
and visuality in the address of televised sport and therefore provide a creative response to
our research question. Creative work can present a phenomenon under inquiry in a different
way by allowing audiences to make connections and to see and hear links between the art
and the wider culture. The normalizing effect of conventionalized ways of representing the
world can be undermined by presenting that world differently. Super cfc disconnects the
sound from the image in televised soccer and then reconnects them in ways that destabilize
 188 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

conventions. This process draws attention to the function of sound within the overall effect of
televised sport. Since sound operates on an affective level, making people react bodily before
they are able to make conscious sense of its impact, they are less aware of its contribution
to the address of sport and leisure forms. As Grossberg (1992) observed, affect may be
the missing term in an adequate account of ideology (p. 82), because it gets at the way
people individually invest in things in an embodied passionate way despite often cognitively
knowing better. Sound may not be in the foreground in experiencing film or video, but it
constructs narrative (i.e., ways of knowing) events. For example, a sequence of images
shown without sound need not necessarily be connected in temporal succession. They can
be understood as discrete unconnected events. However, the addition of realistic, diegetic
sound imposes on the sequence a sense of real time, like normal everyday experience,
and above all, a sense of time that is linear and sequential (Chion, 1994, pp. 1718). By
disrupting the conventionalized connection between sound and image in televised soccer,
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Super cfc began to set in motion an exploration of the audio-visual address of televised sport
to understand its capacity to draw an affective as well as cognitive and emotional response
from the audience.

Forced Marriage of Sound and Image

The methodological approach underpinning this piece is in part derived from Chions (1994)
analytical strategy of creating a forced marriage of sound and image in a film sequence.
Chion suggested that it is possible to encourage reduced listening, and thus to heighten
an audiences sonic awareness by constructing sound experiments such as through the
replacement of an original soundtrack of a film with another sound source. Randomly
selected musical pieces are played over the same film image sequence. The sound, which
has not been designed to accompany the image, will inevitably on occasion achieve a
synchronicity. The accident of unplanned sound-image coupling creates an unsettling effect
in the audience. When the original sound track of the film is played any sense that the sound
and image naturally go together is lost. Instead, the audience is attuned to the fundamental
strangeness of the audio-visual relationship (Chion, p. 189). The audience hears and sees
things that they never would before.
Our piece developed Chions (1994) method by replacing the sound and image track
from a televised soccer match with software manipulated audio and visual samples from
the match. In this way we doubled the effect of the forced marriage experiment by defa-
miliarizing both the image and sound through computer effects and then recombining them
to make new connections. Our aim was to encourage the audience to see and hear things
in televised sport, which we have become conditioned to ignore. Super cfc used image and
sonic samples taken from a live British television broadcast (ITV1) of Chelsea v Barcelona
in the UEFA Champions League on March 8, 2005.

Super cfc: Soccer, Musique Concrete and Contemporary Dance

Musique Concrete
Super cfc is influenced by musique concrete, a compositional aesthetic, which was pioneered
in France in the late 1940s by Pierre Schaeffer. This approach uses recordings of naturally
occurring sounds and subjects them to electronic manipulation. Schaeffer collected con-
crete sounds (i.e., either noise or conventional music) and composed through their direct
transformation thus avoiding traditional musical notation. Schaeffers music liberated the
inherent musical qualities that everyday sounds contain. For example, by slowing down a
sound, hidden rhythms and timbres emerge.
 Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research 189

In Super cfc, ambient natural sounds from the soccer match along with the spoken
words of the pundits and commentators were stretched, compressed and reconstituted to
reveal their musicality. The image and soundscape were independently treated by musical
and video software (i.e., principally, Reaktor and ImX), then recombined. The process,
therefore, involved a deconstruction and reconstruction of the audio-visual relationship
in televised soccer. The resulting film lasts just over 6 minutes and had three sections or
movements.

Movement I
The first movement begins with a slow visual transformation of two footballers jumping to
head a ball. Influenced by the impossible physical feats in contemporary martial arts movies
such as Ang Lees (2000) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a layered ghost-like effect is
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achieved by fading in and out of video samples. At times the repeated loop of the footballers
rising to head the ball is superimposed by long shots of the play. On occasions a flag drifts
slowly across the screen. The accompanying audio evokes a non-western chant or prayer.
Its source is the ex-England manager and pundit, Terry Venables, saying, I gotta tell you,
it is lethal, the away goal is absolutely lethal. However, the guttural qualities inherent in
the voice become more emphasized and de-naturalized through granular electronic manip-
ulation. The voice is accompanied by a second layer that has the feel of a Tibetan trumpet
achieved through the stretching and filtering of the sound of a cheer/whistle.

Movement II
This movement cross-fades (both aurally and visually) into the second section. A looped
close-up shot shows a single player walking and turning. The images slowly morph into
swirling feedback. The temporal qualities of the feedback are changed, at times freezing.
The audio is a manipulated crowd cheer sample where repeated grains are fed through
an audio degrader effect and a granulizing delay creating a single pulsating tone that also
morphs into swirling panning delays verging on total feedback. The audio of the second
movement ends as it fades underneath a frozen feedback image.

Movement III
Visually, the third section consists of short jagged loops. It starts off with a group of players
waiting for a free-kick to be taken. Soon a twitching close-up of a referee appears who
seems to be controlling the proceedings. Briefly, a short loop of open play before the same
close up shot of the referee is faded in again. The video ends with this image. The techniques
involved in the manipulation of the referee moves the video into the VJ world of scratch
video evoking the work of artists like Coldcut4 or Hype Williams, who was responsible for
videos for Missy Elliot (The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), 2001), LL Cool J (Doin It, 2002),
Busta Rhymes (Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See, 2002) among others. The
audio for this section references dance music and hip-hop culture, influenced by electronic
practitioners such as Pole and FX Randomise. The music has a fixed tempo, and has two
layers of treated sample loops. The first layer manipulates crowd cheers and singing, the
second layer is a loop of Terry Venables talking during half-time. The vocal loop is inserted
at the same time as the referee is seen in close up with his lips moving as if forming the
sound.

4
Coldcuts videos can be viewed at http://www.ninjatune.net/videos/.
 190 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

Dance, Movement and Digital Video

Watching televised soccer as a leisure activity involves the recognition of flow, movement
and repetition. The players movements are bounded by space and time limits that produce
set plays, techniques and formations. Contemporary choreographers such as Pina Bausch
use everyday movements as a basis for building new dance material:

Beneath her dancers surface movements lies complexity and depth, an effect
she achieves by skewing the everyday. In Bauschs world, everyday actions
such as wheeling a supermarket trolleyare made unfamiliar. Small movements
are amplified; large actions stripped down. (Kew, 2006, Pina Bausch inspires
devotion. Why?, para. 7)

In Super cfc, the slowing down and repetition of small fragments of movement evokes
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these themes from contemporary dance. For example, in the third movement the players
tugging at socks and shirts and their leg and torso stretches are irregularly repeated to build
up a complex layer of rhythm, which is counter-pointed by the pulsating audio.
Eshun (2000) suggested that advances in the technology of digital cinema have rev-
olutionized broadcasting entertainment culture, enabling new slownesses, new kinetics,
new speeds, new fermitas, new dynamic events (p. 51). Influenced by the Afrofuturist
interest in science fiction as a metaphor for alienation in black life and history, Eshun used
the term animatography to describe the fusion of choreography and digital (i.e., audio and
visual) editing and processing. This editing and processing can create sounds and temporal
movements that appear unnatural and inhuman: an imaginal world of humans modified by
media. Robotic steps, rotary steps, machine gait (Eshun, p. 53). In the second movement
of Super cfc, we see a press photographer taking pictures of the footballer Joe Cole who be-
comes locked in a repeated stuttering loop. Through the use of repetition, this section echoes
steps and turns and stutters used by contemporary video artists like Hype Williams. The
image of the footballer disintegrates into pixels seemingly in response to the intrusiveness
of the telescopic lens of the photographer.
Throughout the film a dialogue occurs between the sound and the visuals, avoiding di-
rect mimicry. However, temporal movements in one medium are commented and expanded
by the other. Eshun (2000) likened this idea to analogising sound into vision embodying
texture rhythms into polymobile patterns (p. 54), whereby rhythmic and distortion tech-
niques used in digital music are employed in digital video. Each medium feeds off the other
appropriating and exchanging ideas and concepts.
In televised sport, all channels of communication are fully loaded and ever changing.
In Super cfc, by contrast, the temporal flow of events was deliberately disrupted slowing
the movement and reducing activity. Abrupt changes last only a moment. Reynolds (2000)
criticized many dance videos for their use of rapid-fire bombardment of imagery. He talked
about how the ear can respond to intense rapid changes, whereas the eye flinches when it
is subjected to over-stimulation and visual assault. In Super cfc, movement and flow are
integrated with visual and audio pauses and freezes.

Voice and the Acousmetre

The voice is of great importance in televised sport and in Super cfc. The much-altered
voice in the first movement is a linking element throughout the film coming into focus only
later when the echo-laden, distorted and transformed vocal reminiscent of dub reggae is
heard alongside the twitching movements of the referee. The referee appears as overseeing
the movement of the players in the third section, as if they are moving to his beat. In the
 Sonic Sport: Sound Art in Leisure Research 191

first movement the voice is heard but the source is not seen, something that Chion (1994)
suggested gives it mysterious powers of authority. Chion described the relationship between
the voice to the screen as the acousmetre. For him the voice is neither inside nor outside
the image:

It is not inside, because the image of the voices sourcethe body, the mouthis
not included. Nor is it outside, since it is not clearly positioned offscreen in an
imaginary wing, like a master of ceremonies or a witness. (Chion, p. 129)

Drawing on Chions observation that the acousmetre has the power of seeing all, Super
cfc alerts us to the sonic positioning of the commentator in televised sport, giving expert
analysis of what is happening on the field of play. The synchronization of the altered vocal
and the referees mouth doubles the effect.
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The Contribution of Sound Art to Leisure Research

In line with Richardson (1997), Super cfc is creative work with a sociological imagination.
Super cfc represents an experimental artistic engagement with the sonic dimensions of the
everyday leisure activity of watching televised sport. It opens ways for the audience to
hear and see televised sport differently. Super cfc destabilizes conventionalized patterns of
representation within televised sport by drawing attention to the pre-conscious or affective
power of sound to draw the audience into identifying with subject positions or I-slots
(Spivak, 1988). When the audience steps into the I-slots offered by televised sport, they
become subject to discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality and nationhood and are asked
to understand sport within the dominant definitions preferred by society (i.e., those empha-
sizing competition, hierarchy, differential access, parochialism, patriotism and even war;
Stempel, 2006). Super cfc instead invites the audience to understand sport as akin to con-
temporary dance or to see bodies of celebrity footballers as alienated (i.e., robotic), subject
to the media gaze (i.e., fragmented in front of the photographers lens), or disciplined by
the authority of the establishment (i.e., the referee).
The de-familiarization of sound and image that Super cfc achieves also creates possi-
bilities for reduced listening to untreated sport broadcasts. As Chion observed, following a
forced marriage observation experiment we hear the original differently always discovering
some sound element that would never have occurred to us. For Finley (2003), arts based
inquiry should embrace a commitment to visionary critical discourse to research efforts
that examine how things are but also imagine how they could be otherwise (p. 293). Su-
per cfc destabilizes existing representations of sport by exposing their sensory address and
enabling the imagining of alternative representations.
According to Carter (2004), Listening is engaged hearing. Its social equivalent in the
visual sphere is the experience of eyes meeting and the sense that this produces of being
involved in a communicational contract (p. 43). Listening, he continued, unlike hearing,
values ambiguity, recognizing it as a communicational mechanism for creating new symbols
and word senses that might eventually become widely adapted (p. 44). Super cfc expands
the ambiguous and ephemeral interplay between sounds and images in televised sport. It
creates a feedback loop between the audio and the visual by opening up the auditory space
and inviting the audience to reconnect sounds with images in this work to sounds and
images in sports broadcasts they have previously seen and heard. Our aim is that the loop
will continue to feed into the audiences critical viewing and listening to televised sport
in the future, denaturalizing the interplay of sound and image and making it impossible
to remain oblivious to the role of sound unaware that there is any codification at all
 192 P. Durrant and E. Kennedy

(Buscombe, 1975, p. 24). The creation of Super cfc contributes to an understanding of the
politics of identity inscribed within the sport media. By focusing on both sound and image
in the address of televised sport, researchers can begin to unravel the ways that the hearing
and seeing audience is drawn to become subject to its discourse.

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