NBC has once again hired Audiobrain, a New York sound-branding company, to collaborate on creating what will be an even more complex sound design for the summer Olympics broadcasts. Audiobrain creates sonic signatures for companies and products including Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony Pulse, Virgin Mobile USA, Apple and IBM’s Thinkpad. This will be Audiobrain’s fourth Olympics audio collaboration with the network.
Audiobrain will act as music supervisors at the broadcasts, responsible for musical content and rights procurement from publishers, labels and artists, information architecture and organization of the music for on-the-fly access during live events and for post production in taped situations, and creative support to producers on site in Beijing during the Olympic Games. NBC will layer even more sound design under the 3,600 hours of events, profiles, commentary and highlight coverage the net will feed through NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA and Telemundo, with about 2,200 hours of live streaming broadband video also available on nbcolympics.com.
The company has produced a reported 30,000-plus audio files for the Olympics broadcasts to support virtually any event, mood, outcome or other visual that might occur. What’s new this year is a more powerful filtering system to locate and retrieve the exact sound clip desired on a moment’s notice. The system allows NBC’s producers to choose sound and music by artist, album, instrumentation, mood, era, and culture of origin. Editors can also tag clips and leave notes for the next shift. Real-time technical support will be available on a 24-hour basis from Audiobrain during the Olympics.
Bob Dixon, director of sound design and communications for NBC’s Olympics audio, says the system has two levels: an MP3 layer for quick downloads to audition music and sound clips against picture, and a .WAV file layer with 44.1 kHz PCM audio for broadcast use. “It really adds another level to the narrative,” he says.