Author Topic: Audience sweetening (Read 14516 times)

cmjb13 · « **on:** August 21, 2003, 07:08:28 PM »

When this was first created, was this planned ahead of time (for example, before a series starts in case of dead audiences) or created as a show went along as needed.

tvrandywest · « **Reply #1 on:** August 21, 2003, 08:25:30 PM »

A short question with a long answer that (thankfully) I won't post here ;-)

Sweetening was actually experimented with in the days of live radio using 78rpm sfx records. There were even applause machines tested wherein artificial \"hands\" on rotating wheels slapped against each other! Sweetening came into its own when the movie studios stopped fighting the growth of television and began supplying programs on film to the medium. Those filmed sitcoms were all produced using single camera film techniques without an audience, and after live radio and live TV with audiences, they sounded terribly dry. That was the big-time birth of canned laughter and applause.

Today many producers and programmers feel that a show becomes more compelling to the home viewer and seems more entertaining when the audible \"audience\" is wild with enthusiasm. Thus even on shows where the audience is already pumped (including TPIR) the audience is enhanced to meet the ever increasing level of what sounds \"right\". That's a decision that's made either prior to the first episode being taped, or shortly thereafter when the natural sound of the audience is evaluated.

Recently on shows such as LINGO, the choice to use sweetening is made long before production begins to compensate for either small or non-existant audiences - it saves money over dealing with the costs and hidden complexities of actually having people present.

Answered?

Randy
tvrandywest.com

PeterMarshallFan · « **Reply #2 on:** August 21, 2003, 08:57:11 PM »

Did \"Sports Challenge\" use sweetening? On the ep I taped this morning, the applause/cheering sounds the same every.....single.....time. I do remember Enberg snapping at the \"audience\" on occasion but methinks there was no audience.

cmjb13 · « **Reply #3 on:** August 22, 2003, 06:15:31 AM »

There is a guy in the sound booth at TPIR (don't know his name) who sit's in front of a small keyboard and presses a key for canned applause. After hearing it very briefly, it's been used on the $1M specials, and I've noticed this exact sound has been used on other shows (Comb's Feud, Eubanks CS, and even PYL)

CBSJokersWildFan · « **Reply #4 on:** August 22, 2003, 06:41:54 AM »

[quote name=\'PeterMarshallFan\' date=\'Aug 21 2003, 08:57 PM\']Did \"Sports Challenge\" use sweetening? [/quote]

Yes it did.

tvrandywest · « **Reply #5 on:** August 22, 2003, 10:37:12 AM »

[quote name=\'cmjb13\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 05:15 AM\'] There is a guy in the sound booth at TPIR (don't know his name) who sit's in front of a small keyboard and presses a key for canned applause. [/quote]
Correctamundo ;-)

That keyboard accesses over 2 dozen individual sampled stereo audience sounds from extremely subtle laughter by about about 5 or 6 people, all the way up to big laughs (you can usually hear one of the medium laughs after the \"37 hours\" range game joke). It also has a bunch of applause bursts (small to large), and that very familiar audience screaming heard on the primetime shows' 6 one-bids, plus a nice assortment of \"oooh\"s, and \"aaah\"s ;-)

PRICE is the only show I've watched produced that sweetens \"on the fly\". All others I've worked/watched sweeten in post.

(Cue applause and music button)

Randy
tvrandywest.com

Jimmy Owen · « **Reply #6 on:** August 22, 2003, 11:07:04 AM »

Remember on the NYC Pyramid, when all of a sudden there would be thunderous applause out of nowhere? That sounded like it could have been done at the time of taping (otherwise I think they would have done it with a little more finesse.)

cmjb13 · « **Reply #7 on:** August 22, 2003, 11:17:53 AM »

[quote name=\'tvrandywest\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 09:37 AM\']That keyboard accesses over 2 dozen individual sampled stereo audience sounds from extremely subtle laughter by about about 5 or 6 people, all the way up to big laughs[/quote]
I wonder where they originally recorded those sounds. They are heard on a lot of shows.

uncamark · « **Reply #8 on:** August 22, 2003, 12:03:40 PM »

[quote name=\'cmjb13\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 10:17 AM\']I wonder where they originally recorded those sounds. They are heard on a lot of shows.[/quote]
Most likely, they were taken from \"TPIR\" audiences--since the advent of stereo television, they've had to dump the loops that were used year after year from the 50s. On CBS shows nowadays, \"TPIR\" is the most likely source because you have such enthusiastic audiences on that show.

Back in the days of Mother MacKenzie at NBC, they came from various shows--supposedly, the big laugh you always heard after Paul Lynde's lines on \"Squares\" came from an unaired bit from \"You Bet Your Life\" where a contestant told about standing outside a tall building naked. In his \"As Long as They're Laughing!,\" producer Bob Dwan said that the story got the biggest laugh in the history of the show, but only the response made it on the air--on other NBC shows.

As for other Mother MacKenzie tracks, the phased audience shouting heard on \"Wheel\" and \"CS\" (among others) probably came from \"LMAD\" audiences when that show was taped there (phased so it's hard to tell that they're shouting \"Take the curtain!\" or \"Door No. 1!\" instead of \"Big Money!\" or \"Higher!\"), while a kids' screaming/cheering track heard on \"The Gong Show\" and various shows' \"Kids Weeks\" came from the 1972 kids game show \"Runaround\"--the giveaway being that, due to a bad edit on the loop, you hear the bell that \"Runaround\" used as a sound effect.

As for \"YAAAAHOO!\", I assume that if an NBC stagehand supposedly wore a cowboy hat and made that noise, one day a sound man asked him to do into a microphone for posterity.

Mike Tennant · « **Reply #9 on:** August 22, 2003, 01:17:51 PM »

[quote name=\'cmjb13\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 10:17 AM\']I wonder where they originally recorded those sounds. They are heard on a lot of shows.[/quote]
To add to uncamark's info, laughs in the mono days were also often taken from I Love Lucy and The Red Skelton Show because both shows had many moments of purely physical comedy that allowed for lifting of clean laughs. Need more info? Try this link.

chris319 · « **Reply #10 on:** August 22, 2003, 05:50:25 PM »

Game shows were generally all sweetened on the fly in the '70s and '80s. Po$t production co$t$.

Not all of the Mackenzie tracks came from archived shows. If we needed an audience shouting \"double\" for the MG star wheel for example, Johnny Olson would instruct the audience to shout \"double\" while an audio tape was recording. In fact the technical challenge to lifting audience reaction from a show recorded in monaural is separating audience reax from music and dialog.

BrandonFG · « **Reply #11 on:** August 22, 2003, 06:05:39 PM »

[quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 04:50 PM\'] Game shows were generally all sweetened on the fly in the '70s and '80s. Po$t production co$t$.

Not all of the Mackenzie tracks came from archived shows. If we needed an audience shouting "double" for the MG star wheel for example, Johnny Olson would instruct the audience to shout "double" while an audio tape was recording. In fact the technical challenge to lifting audience reaction from a show recorded in monaural is separating audience reax from music and dialog. [/quote]
There's a certain laugh I recall hearing on MGPM, that was more commonly used on CBS Feud, when showing the family poses. Where did this one originally come from?

tvrandywest · « **Reply #12 on:** August 22, 2003, 06:56:36 PM »

[quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Aug 22 2003, 04:50 PM\'] Game shows were generally all sweetened on the fly in the '70s and '80s. Po$t production co$t$. [/quote]
Great point, Chris.

Ahh, the good ole days. I guess sweetening is part of the post process now because every damn show is posted to death (the opposite of \"live\") anyway.

Randy
tvrandywest.com

Ryan_Conley194 · « **Reply #13 on:** April 23, 2005, 05:33:19 PM »

I wonder if there is any way that I can acquire these audience SFX heard on many NBC or CBS game shows. There is one crowd track that is used sometimes on CBS game shows that appears on a cartoon sound effects library.

Kevin Prather · « **Reply #14 on:** April 23, 2005, 06:25:02 PM »

There are lots of generic audience sfx floating around out there. BigJon has some nice ones in his games.