The collective groan. Muted applause. A strangled ‘Come on!' Thwack, thwack, roar. One of the curious pleasures of walking around The Grounds during the Championships is gauging how play is progressing simply from listening to the noise of the crowd.
“Tennis is a sport you can enjoy as much on radio as on TV,” says Louise Brown.
As a Foley artist – that is, a specialist creator of sound effects for film and media – Louise is more audio-sensitive than the majority of us. Her vocabulary is full of words like waggle, fizz and thwunk; she has a box of tools that includes gloves, bells, coconut shells, handcuffs and squeaky hinges. As a kid who loved the ‘delicious’ sound of John McClane running around stairwells in Diehard, she knew she had found her calling when she signed up for a degree course in music technology.
Working with her field recordist partner Rick Blything, Brown’s creative expertise has been put to intriguing use for the 2015 Championships.
The hardest sound to recreate was the tennis ball striking a racket. It took time to conclude that a ball was like a soft furry nut
As part of the Community Art Project, she was asked to join young people from Wandsworth Vision Support Service to record the iconic sounds of Wimbledon using ‘non-tennis related objects’. The result is an amazing three-minute soundscape which plays in a loop to fans crossing the bridge in the Queue.
Whereas the day job might normally involve shaking seeds in a drum to replicate the sound of rain or wobbling a sheet for thunder, Brown had to dig deep – to borrow some tennis lingo – to find ways of reproducing the sound of a ball being struck, or a ball hitting the net cord, or a ball bouncing on grass without using a ball or net or grass at all.
“It was definitely the most creatively challenging project I’ve ever worked on,” she said. “The young people were great. I'd love to have had more time with them. I do it as a job but that doesn't mean I have all the answers. The hardest sound to recreate was the tennis ball striking a racket. It took time to conclude that a ball was like a soft furry nut. We ended up layering sounds: half a coconut shell with some fabric over the top, an elastic twang, a bang on an empty tube of tennis balls and catching kiwi fruit.”
For the whoosh of a racket, she and Rick both swung an inner tube of a bicycle tyre for altering pitches. The bounce of a ball on grass came via a kiwi dropping on a bed of coriander. To reproduce the sound of a tube of balls being opened – lid off, seal peeled back and balls rolling out – they used a tub of sweets, a can of fizzy drink, a tin of beans with more kiwis and coriander. The audio parallel of a tennis player slipping and hitting the court came by hitting and tearing a cabbage. Even Rufus the Hawk was subject to audio deconstruction. The young people met him and his handler and brilliantly recorded his wing flaps with soft leather gloves and his little leg bells with a couple of Chinese bells.
“The sound that was the most satisfying to achieve was the net hit,” she recalls. “We didn’t expect it to sound so authentic, but it sounds so good.” How did they pull it off? A long metal strip was struck and wobbled and layered with the sound of a leather strap from a satchel bag being whipped and wobbled and a microwave beep.
The Community Art Project was established in 2011 as a way of further involving young people in Wimbledon. Every year since then the Learning department has worked alongside artists and young people from within the local area on a piece of artwork to be displayed during The Championships. The aim is to open up the wider world of Wimbledon to those people who may never have experienced The Championships, or tennis, and use their ideas and input to create something slightly different to the expected for the public to enjoy each year during the Fortnight.
