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Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
Me and my friend made a Puredata patch (http://puredata.info) to filter the vuvuzela sound. You have the ability to choose the sound also, making it more dynamic.
check it at http://joaomartins.entropiadesign.org/2010/06/15/vuvuzela-filter-a-puredata-approach/
When the World Cup started, I thought of playing around with notch filters to remove the noise, but the whole thing just reeked of effort. The human brain is actually pretty good at filtering out noise if you give it a chance. Just watch the games and don't worry about the vuvuzelas and before long you won't even notice them. I don't. It's a lot like what happens when you live next to a highway.
I wonder how long before half of what one sees and hears in supposedly "live" TV has been digitally massaged in some manner.
You could take out ugly buildings to make a scene more aesthetically pleasing, notch out one particular persons voice, or remove an 'annoying' five seconds of tape.
This subtle dichotomy between actual real life and tv "real life" could widen to the point of audiences being fed the "Leave it to Beaver" version of the real. We're generally already pissed off enough that our lives don't match the fake TV shows but this could bring a whole new level of cognitive dissonance, since these are supposedly "live" evens.
The horns are there, in the stadium. They may be annoying but they are part of the event. I guess if it turns cloudy, perhaps they can photoshop in some blue sky...
Regards.
American football is short bursts of incredibly intricate plays in which every player is doing something worth analysis, and it provides long pauses during which that analysis can be shown from every angle possible in a three-dimensional world. The game we are talking about here is on a different time scale, in which players don't have so many set plays (since it doesn't start from the more-or-less known configuration of two separate groups facing each other), so every player needs to be inventive and adapt as the play progresses. There are also very few times when a producer can be sure nothing interesting is going to happen, so replays need to be kept to a minimum, and following the continually changing strategies might be more difficult with frequent camera-angle changes.
Also, I suspect there is a single feed for the coverage (can someone confirm?) so a video producer needs to be extra confident before interrupting the feed to however many networks to show a replay that might overrun the play that makes the game. For most American football games, I think the coverage is bought by a single network, and the person selecting the camera angles and replays works for the same people as do the announcers, so they may have more freedom to try things out.
I would also be interested in seeing what the coverage in the U.S. actually looks like (including the half-time and full-time replays), and comparing it with BBC/ITV broadcasts. Maybe we are not talking about the same thing.