Quick Hits On The Swish: Basketball’s Signature Sound

00:00:30 Speaker 1: In addition to being the longest word I knew for most of my elementary school years. Automatopeia is a type of word that phonetically replicates the sound it describes, so, in short, a word that sounds like the thing it's referencing. The most common automatopeias are typically animal sounds like oink, meow, or woolf, but there's also TikTok the sound of a clock, or splash the sound of water hitting something. It would make sense that most autos are relatively similar across different languages. It's not like the sound of a dog barking is completely different. Depending on what language we speak, we still hear the same thing. But things don't always make sense, and in fact, a lot of automotopias can vary significantly depending on the language. Without getting too linguistic, different languages produce different phonetic sounds, like how there are no rolling ours in English, but there are in Spanish. So while it seems like automotopias would be relatively similar no matter the language spoken, most are surprisingly not. In English, we would refer to the sound of a crow as a ca like caw caaw in Ukrainian they would say car for what it's worth. The Ukrainians might be onto something with that one. The TikTok of a clock in English becomes ticetio ticetio in Italian, the thump or badumb of a heart becomes doky doki in Japanese, and the nomnom of eating food becomes month month in German. There are, however, some exceptions where the sound of an automatopoeia is largely the same across languages. The most iconic sound associated with the sport of basketball, for instance, is one of those exceptions. I'm not talking about the squeak of sneakers on a court or the sound of a basketball bouncing up and down. I'm talking about the ethereal, crisp, magical sound of a ball hitting nothing but the net, the sound of a swish. I'm Will Gatchel. This is Sports Dot MP three and today's Quick Hits episode. We'll be diving into the story of how audio engineers helped make the swish the most iconic sound in basketball, even though the sport existed for decades before the term was even coined. So without further ado, let's get into it. James Naismith invented the sport of basketball in eighteen ninety one. Now, I don't know about you, but when I hear something like that, part of my brain just categorizes it as a long time ago. If it was nineteen twenty or eighteen seventy, it would feel just about the same a long time ago. So to add some context, Naismith invented basketball about fifteen years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, twelve years after Thomas Edison created the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb, and five years after John Pemberton invented a carbonated sugary beverage called Coca cola. Raised on a farm in a small town near Ottawa, Canada, Naismith eventually became a physic educator at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, now called Springfield College, and it was there that in eighteen ninety one, while looking for a way to exercise his students in the winter, he created a game involving a soccer ball two peach baskets in an indoor gymnasium. It would be another eleven years before the invention of the Teddy Bear, twenty seven before fortune cookies and forty seven before ballpoint pens. Just for a little more context, Nasmith's invention was not the fine tuned, high flying form of entertainment it is today, but despite requiring someone to climb up a ladder and retrieve the ball from the peach basket every time a team scored, it clearly had potential. Over the following decades, Naismith implemented a number of changes to the rules of basketball and its equipment, ranging from cutting off the bottoms of the baskets so there were no more ladders required to develop helping standardized basketballs that didn't have laces like footballs, and yes, that was really a thing for the first few years. As basketball began to rise in popularity across the United States, the peach baskets were eventually replaced with metal hoops or rims. A key innovation that would change the game forever occurred in early nineteen thirty six thanks to Alvi E. Sandeberg, who patented a design for what he called a basketball goal aka a hoop that had tiny connectors all around the metal rim, which allowed for the easy installation of nets, as someone could simply loop the net through all the connectors around the ring. This standardized hoop, while not particularly flashy, led to the widespread adoption of netted hoops, which in turn created the sound we most associate with basketball now. That sound when a basketball goes into the hoop without touching the rim and hits the net, causing it to snap and create a swishing set is universally recognized. Yet interestingly enough, the first instance of the word swish came in the form of a fictional story. You see. In nineteen thirteen, author Trebor Yarns wrote a story called The Coward, and in it, his fictitious protagonist, Dempsey Darden, makes a game winning college basketball shot. Here's the passage quote. The ball described a half ellipse in mid air and descended straight for the basket. A swish of netting resounded as the ball dropped through the goal without touching the iron rim end quote. His choice of description would ninety eight years later be shouted on countless basketball courts across the world every day, and not just because the term was the perfect type of catchy automatopoeia for virality. There's another reason we associate the swish with basketball, and that's because the National Basketball Association won us to hear each and every swish. Nylon based nets became the standard in the nineteen forties, replacing other materials like hemp, which was prone to breaking and cotton, which warped too quickly. And since nylon is a bit thicker than these other materials, it made the sound of the swish even more crisp and clean. Coincidentally, the Basketball Association of America, which merged with the National Basketball League in nineteen forty nine to form the National Basketball Association or NBA, was created just around this time, in nineteen forty six. As I've mentioned in previous episodes, the acoustics of modern day sports are a complex culmination of various technologies, carefully placed microphones and sound design techniques geared towards entertainment. The squeak of sneakers on hardwood courts, the bouncing of the ball, and the swish of the net we hear when watching basketball on TV or in person have all been carefully crafted and enhanced to sound like they do. Picture this. You're watching a basketball game on the TV. When a player shoots a corner three, the ball beautifully arcs in the air as it heads towards the basket. It drops perfectly, not touching any part of the rim, and as it hits nothing but the net, a sound emanates from your TV speakers. If you were sitting court side at the game during the exact same play, with thousands of fans screaming at the top of their lungs as the ball went in, you'd need superpowered hearing to actually hear the sound of the swish over all that other noise. So how can you hear it on the TV? Well, it's because for several decades, the broadcasts of NBA games have used carefully placed microphones to capture, boost and then transmit these sounds of the game into the broadcast, making them more entertaining and emotional. Tiny microphones are set up on each rim to capture the audio of every single swish or clank, and that's why we can hear them when in reality those sounds would be too quiet to pick up. Starting in the early two thousands, a number of teams decided to take this approach a step further by ensuring these sounds could be heard by the fans watching the games in person. There was a slight problem, though, having microphones that capture and boost all the sounds in a basketball game tends to pick up a lot of language that can't be aired to the entire arena. Newsflash, lots of athletes cuss, as Former MAVs forward Dorian Finney Smith said, quote my mom says the basketball court is the only place I can cuss. End quote. So while televised games enjoy the benefit of a slight delay between the actual event and their broad casts, allowing for explotives to be muted, the sound systems of arenas don't have that same luxury. The Dallas Mavericks were one of the first teams to implement in stadium audio picked up at the rims, and their solution to the cussing was simple, do it manually. And that is where Jeff McGinnis enters the story. Mark Cuban, the owner of the MAVs and a frequent Shark Tank Shark, had been asking about the possibility of adding more audio into the arena feeds, and Jeff, an audio engineer for the Mavericks since nineteen ninety nine, took it upon himself to do just that. On each basket, Jeff installed one microphone to capture rim sounds and another to capture backboard sounds. Unfortunately, such a setup would create a huge problem feedback the bane of audio engineers everywhere. If one of the microphones picked up the sound of a swish, it would then play into the stadium speakers, But then the very same microphone would pick up the sound of the swish playing on the speakers and play that into the speakers again, thus creating feedback, a loud, annoying sound that no one wants to hear. To prevent this, Jeff would have to manually boost the volume of the microphones on the rim every single time someone shot the ball, and then immediately turned the volume back down, allowing the mic to transmit the sound of the swish or clank across the stadium without picking up any feedback. So every single time the ball was shot in every single game, Jeff would manually adjust the mic levels, and he did just that. Upon implementing the strategy, the other teams soon took notice of the Mavericks in game stadium sounds, and when they reached out to the Mavericks to understand how they were able to have such loud audio, most were shocked to hear it was all just a guy named Jeff. Tim Cato, a reporter for The Athletic, was in disbelief too, until he stood behind Jeff for an entire game and noted that the audio engineer didn't miss time a single shot. In the past few years, the development of more technologically advanced sound systems has automated a lot of what Jeff was doing manually, and most, if not all, modern day NBA team arenas employ some form of microphones to enhance on court audio in the stadium. And while the sounds of a ball clinking off the rim or a shot getting pinned to the backboard will always evoke some emotions, there's nothing quite like the sound of a swish. And you don't have to take just my word for it, because Jeff feels the same way. Quote any three point shot right through the net not hitting the rim, if I get it at the right exact time, it's the greatest sound ever. End quote, And that folks does it. For today's episode of Sports Dot MP three, I know it was a short one, but I'll be back with a normal sized episode next week. I'm your host, Will Gatchel. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll see you next week. Peace. It is at a at don't don't, but it is not a contact. Don't don't