This chapter in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (edited by Michael Bull) considers how the auditory is a crucial aspect of sporting experiences. It examines different ways that sudden and sometimes dramatic changes to sporting soundscapes can drastically shift the atmosphere and experience of a sporting event. The authors argue for an acoustemological approach sport that uncovers how “sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth” in sporting environments.

This audio documentary was produced by sound designer Peregrine Andrews and is hosted by Dennis Baxter, resident sound designer for the Olympic Games. The documentary explores sound in the context of television broadcasts, with a focus on the sounds that viewers hear beneath the commentator’s voices. The Sound of Sport is especially concerned with how notions of ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ sound get blurred as sounds are added, subtracted, and manipulated to enhance sports broadcasts.

Andrews also wrote a companion piece for the documentary that includes audio examples.

The episode was also re-aired on the 99% Invisible podcast in 2014.

This article challenges “the historical elevation of sight over the other senses in ethnography” and offers insight into how the other sense can figure more prominently in ethnographic analyses. On sound, Sparkes follows broader theorizations of soundscapes and acoustic space by calling for greater attention to the sonic dimensions of sport and exercise in ethnographic work.

Created and hosted by Sound, Sport, and the Digital Working Group members Sam Clevenger and Oliver Rick, each Somatic episode “explores a fascinating topic concerning our everyday experiences, spaces, cultures, practices, and communities related to our bodies in motion.”

Suggested Episodes:
Reflections on Running and Gender (2018) – This episode features Dr. Katie Esmonde and combines audio recordings of her running with original music as a way to reflect on the embodied experience of running in a city.

The Spaces of Suburbia (2017) – This episode fuses multiple types of audio – interviews, ambient recordings of recreation, clips from 1950s/60s television – to create a sonic exploration of physical culture spaces.

This journal article examines the “sensuous dimensions of sporting activity” with a focus on distance runners. The analysis includes a section on how runners become skilled at “making auditory evaluations of the physical and social spaces they run through.”

This auto-ethnographic study of distance running highlights “the importance of aural and visual components” of “knowledge in action that underpins the production of running-together.” The analysis explores, for example, how runners develop listening practices to navigate urban environments and traffic while listening to their co-runner’s breath to maintain a safe pace.

This article investigates “the aural dimension of asthma experiences, examining the role of ‘auditory attunement’ and ‘auditory work’ in sporting embodiment.” The analysis demonstrates how sound and listening offer unique pathways into understanding athletes’ lived experiences of asthma and how athletes conduct ‘auditory work’ to know and manage their breathing.

Part of a larger project exploring the sounds of skateboarding, this article demonstrates how “the sounds produced by skateboards, or skatesounds, are a common basis of complaint among the urban public and yet a source of inspiration and joy for skateboarding participants.” The authors introduce a novel theory of texturology describing how “skateboarders possess a unique sensory knowledge of the surface materials and textures of the city through skatesound, a knowledge specific to skateboarding.”

Dr. Ben Powis’ work on the sensory experiences of visually impaired cricket examines how auditory knowledge informs the ways players navigate these fast-paced, dynamic sport environments.

Visual impairment, sport and somatic work: the auditory experiences of blind and partially sighted cricket players (2018)

Soundscape elicitation and visually impaired cricket: using auditory methodology in sport and physical activity research (2019)

Some research has applied feminist and anti-racist frameworks to show how public disapproval of the grunting sounds made by women tennis players works to police these athletes’ behavior acccording to stereotypical norms of white femininity.

Anita Stahl – Somaesthetics of the Grunt: Policing Femininity in the Soundscapes of Women’s Professional Tennis (2022)

Leticia Ridley – Grunt Work: Serena Williams’ Black Sound Acts as Resistance (2023)

Crowd noise is widely mythologized as having profound influences on sporting events, especially in how it produces a ‘home advantage’ for athletes competing in front of loud, enthusiastic supporters. Some researchers have investigated the sociocultural dimensions of crowd noise in how these sounds are intertwined with identities, can build community among fans, can be commodified, and can be manipulated to enhance sports broadcasts.

Luis Achondo – The silent majority: social and aural silence in the games of Chile Men’s national football team (2023)

Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær – The Sounds of Spectators at Football (2023)

Mack Hagood & Travis Vogan – The 12th Man: Fan noise in the contemporary NFL (2016)

Katie Hemsworth – Good vibrations? Crowd Noise and the “Physicality” of Sound across Sportscapes

Meri Kytö – ‘We are the rebellious voice of the terraces, we are Çarşı’: constructing a football supporter group through sound (2010)

Jordan Zalis – Capital culture, political performance: Listening to football in Ottawa 2014–2015 (2021)

Some researchers have examined the so-called ‘ghost games’ in which sporting events have taken place without spectators and the noise they produce. These types of events became commonplace during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and produced novel, sometimes unsettling soundscapes, in which the absence of crowd noise created space to hear the sounds of sport differently.

Jeffrey W. Kassing, Mary Helen Clark, Carrie Kaput, Trinity Winton, Keara Katayama, Suzanne Day, Isiah Utley, & Aleah N. Fisher – Ghost Games and Artificial Soundscapes: Sports Media and Fan Reactions to the Return of European Soccer Matches in Empty Stadia (2022)

Giulia Sarno – Not People but a Sound: Virtual Audio and the Appropriation of Fandom Practices in Pandemic Football (2022)

This international edited collection includes essays from scholars from multiple disciplines including psychology, sociology, history, musicology, cultural studies, and sports studies. The book explores how sport and music are intertwined in contexts ranging from elite sports mega-events to grassroots, community sports. Some of the topics covered include the use of music to enhance athletic performance, music at the Olympics, and sport in popular music forms.

This book investigates how sport and music are ‘synergistic agents’ in the exchange of styles, forms, and ideologies. Yet McLeod highlights the contradictions in how music and sport co-exist in cultural spaces with special attention to how the music/sport relationship can produce paradoxes along lines of gender, race, social class, sexuality, and national identity. Chapters explore how meanings and identities associated with particular songs or genres are often transformed or subverted once they become sporting anthems.

This long-form article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation traces a cultural history of the connection between sports and popular music. Artists discussed include Lou Reed, Warren Zevon, Cyndi Lauper, Kraftwerk, and the Beastie Boys.

This special issue is focused on the construction of individual and collective identities through sport/music connections.

Anthony Bateman – Introduction: sport, music, identities

Articles include analyses of the history of music and sport in England, the connection between Olympics ideology and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” as protest song, and the musical effects of cricket’s global/colonial expansion.

This special issue critically examines, debates, and sheds light on “the intersection of hip-hop culture and sport, in all of its manifestations, and especially as contemporary forms of entertainment and cultural expression that are closely linked with issues of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and age.”

Introductions:
Michael Eric Dyson – Foreword: 2Pac’s Legacy From the Hip-Hop Platform

C. Keith Harrison & Jay Coakley – Hip-Hop and Sport—An Introduction: Reflections on Culture, Language, and Identity

Articles include a Marxist analysis of hip-hop’s ubiquitous presence in sports contexts, investigations of Jay Z’s cultural and economic connections to sports, and an exploration of baseball’s “translation” through rap lyrics. The special issue ends with an editorial featuring conversations with journalist Jemele Hill and rappers Bun B, Fat Joe, and IDK.

This special issue considers the interconnections of music and sport as forms of leisure and how they how these forms “intersect and interact to give some people moments of fantasy and pleasure and agency, and how others struggle to have that freedom.”

Introduction:
Jonathan Long & Karl Spracklen – Music and sport: exploring the intersections

Articles include analyses of White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” as a sporting anthem, the communicative power of a sports television title sequence, music’s role in the production of nostalgia in rugby, and Bob Dylan’s lyrics about boxing.

The Wall of Song Project is a collaborative and participatory art and civic singing platform created by artist (and Sound, Sport, and the Digital Working Group member) Mel Day and Michael Namkung. The Wall of Song Project is designed to build a growing video chorus and collective singing ritual through a combination of online singing, public performances, and gallery installations.

Between 2019 and 2022, Day collaborated with Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique (also a Sound, Sport, and the Digital Working Group member) on the Wall of Song’s second project built around the iconic Nina Simone song “Feeling Good.” Hundreds of athletes, fans, and community supporters were recorded singing Feeling Good online or in sports stadiums then combined into a virtual chorus (see video below). The song was chosen as an anthem of solidarity and call to promote a more equitable, racially just community within women’s sports – particularly for Black and Indigenous women, girls, and non-binary athletes of color, who live at the intersection of racial injustice and gender inequity. The project harnesses how participatory art and athlete activism can help support collective action toward positive social change.

This article maps the NBA’s change in philosophy around hip-hop music and culture: whereas the league once shunned hip-hop music and fashion (and its representation of a form of Blackness thought to be undesirable to white audiences), the NBA has since embraced hip-hop as a marketable aspect of its brand.

Todd Boyd – Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (2008)

Adam Cohen & Khalid Ballouli – Exploring the cultural intersection of music, sport and physical activity among at-risk youth (2018)

Louis Harrison, Jr., Leonard N. Moore & Lynn Evans – Ear to the Streets: The Race, Hip-Hop, and Sports Learning Community at Louisiana State University (2006)

David J. Leonard – The Real Color of Money: Controlling Black Bodies in the NBA (2006)

David J. Leonard – It’s gotta be the body: race, commodity, and surveillance of contemporary black athletes (2009)

Steve Marston – Make room for hip-hop: mass-print mediation of ‘baggy’ basketball shorts, 1990–1994 (2017)

This article discusses the role of music performance in football matches, highlighting how numerous actors – from supporters to players to journalists – believe in the power of music as having the power to impact match outcomes.

Analyzing “the relationship between football and black sound cultures in the UK,” this article “examines the inclusion of football in post-Windrush calypsos, the appropriation of black music forms in football stadia, reggae as cultural critique of English football and British society, and the connections between transnational sounds and a diasporic footballing consciousness.”

This article explores how music and football have been interlinked in the United Kingdom over the past century, including examinations of early novelty songs, music at stadia, popular music, and music in television broadcasts.

This article discusses the role of music performance in football matches, highlighting how numerous actors – from supports to players to journalists – believe in the power of music as having the power to impact match outcomes.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written by Tin Pan Alley songwriters Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer in 1908, and has since become one of the most recognizable songs in American culture. It became the basis for an iconic sing-a-long tradition during the 7th Inning Stretch at baseball games nationwide after legendary broadcaster Harry Caray began performing the song at Chicago White Sox games (a tradition he carried over to his more famous tenure as the voice of the Chicago Cubs).

The Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast episode, “Take Who Out to the Ball Game?”, explores the song’s history and uncovers a surprisingly feminist message within its lyrics.

Kelly Hewson – “You Said You Didn’t Give a Fuck about Hockey”: Popular Culture, the Fastest Game on Earth and the Imagined Canadian Nation (2009)

Mark Norman – “The Good Ol’ Hockey Game”: The Cultural Resonance of Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “The Hockey Song” (2013)

Matt Ventresca – John K. Samson and the Intersection of Sport, Music, and Politics (2012)

Originally a keynote address at the 2018 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport annual conference, this article theorizes “the cultural, material, and political affective salience of national anthems staged prior to sporting events.” It examines a multi-lingual performance of “O Canada” prior to an NHL hockey game in the context of Canadian colonial histories and settler imaginaries, as well as “the projection of hatred onto former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest of racism during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in 2016.”

This article investigates how roller derby is connected to do-it-yourself punk philosophies and the feminist politics of the Riot Grrrl movement. It argues that “roller derby enables women to experience a creative, gendered leisure space in which popular music, play and competitive sport come together, with women placed at its centre.”

This article, by Sound, Sport, and the Digital Working Group member Nik Dickerson, analyses how a series of anti-drug advertisements featuring celebrity athletes reproduce “Chronic Black Male Sporting Hood,” a trope that holds the Black body in a state of dehumanization. The second half of the paper applies the methodological approach of Black Annotation/Redaction to show that testimonials from Black athletes and the influence of Black musicians combine to illuminate alternative ways of being human that emerge from anti-Black sports practices related to marijuana.

This article offers a “critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste” by examining how the South Korean Olympic ice dance skated to a traditional Korean folk song at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The authors argue that non-white skaters are often racialized through cultural classifications informed by Orientalism.

Dean Biron – My favourite album: Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson (2017)

Gena Caponi-Tabery – Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America (2008)

David Cosper – Sweet Science, Sweet Thunder: Jazz, Pugilism, and the Fine Art of Criticism (2021)

Shawn Selby – Hot Jazz and Black Ball: Connections Between Music and Baseball in Pittsburgh and Kansas City (2010)

This album from renowned Minneapolis-based jazz-funk guitarist Cory Wong is described as a “musical and athletic performance” that Wong and his 11-piece band recorded on an ice rink while wearing hockey equipment (including skates!). Here’s how Wong explained the sport-music fusion: “I’m interested in the limitations of my focus and the musical excellence of my band. I run experiments seeing what kind of challenges we can give ourselves to perform well under any circumstance. Have you always wanted to see a band perform in hockey gear on a hockey rink? Probably not…but here we are. It turned out to be an incredible entertainment experience!”

The 2018 NASSS conference held in Vancouver B.C. was organized around the theme Sport Soundtrack: Sport, Music, and Culture. Driven by then NASSS president-elect (and Sound, Sport, and the Digital Working Group member) Akilah Carter-Francique, the conference theme explores how the symbiotic relationship of sport and music infuses both cultural institutions as sport and music work together to “forge communities, imbue national pride, and promote cultural identities.”

You can view the conference program here.

From Humanities Commons, this guide provides overviews of data sonification basics and techniques.

TwoTone is a free online data sonification platform where users can create audio representations of their data or create data-driven music.

The TwoTone website also provides some tutorials and examples to help learn the software.

Audacity is a free, open-source audio editing and recording program that is great for interviews, voice-overs, podcasts, and simple music projects.

The Audacity website contains an extensive page of tutorials and technical support tips. You can also find video tutorials on YouTube that explain the program for beginners.

Apple’s popular recording app available for Mac/iOS devices, which comes pre-loaded on many Mac computers. Largely marketed to musicians, GarageBand is still a useful tool for all sound recording projects.

There are also many YouTube tutorial videos that provide the basic rundown on how to use the software.

The popularity of podcasts has been accompanied by a wealth of instructional guides and tutorials outlining how to produce professional sounding podcasts. Here are some guides created by university libraries or public media outlets:

University of Michigan – Basics for podcasts and other forms of audio storytelling production

University of Guelph – How to Create a Podcast

University of Toronto at Scarborough – Introduction to Podcasting

National Public Radio – Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students