Sound Branding At The Summer Olympics

NYC based Audiobrain is a sonic branding and interactive audio company who are sourcing music and sound clips to enhance the 2008 Summer Olympics. NBC and Audiobrain are in the process of collecting over 30,000 tracks to add tension, enhance the mood or create drama for all 3,600 hours of Olympic programming.

To ensure that they always have the perfect mood-enhancing track ready to go, NBC is digitizing Audiobrain’s collection of pop songs, classic-film scores, and original compositions and storing them in a sophisticated database that enables them to find the perfect track on the fly.

Fast Company reports:

When NBC’s producers prepare a segment, they use the database to zero in on the exact tone they’re looking to set. Producers can search by artist, album, instrumentation, mood, decade, and culture of origin, so when recapping a Norwegian’s javelin victory subsequently overturned by a rules violation, they can utilize key words such as “rousing,” “Scandinavian,” and “moody” to hone their choices. NBC’s editors can tag clips and leave one another tips and suggestions, see when a track last aired, and — if time is running short — even press a button requesting help from Arbeeny or Audiobrain cofounder and creative director Michael Sweet, who will be working alternating 12- to 18-hour shifts from NBC’s Beijing headquarters.

Fast Company: “Audiobrain Meets NBC: Creating Music for the Beijing Olympics”