#Inside look at how NFL fake crowd noise sounds like real thing

The biggest takeaway for Vince Caputo, vice president/supervising sound mixer for NFL Films, from the opening weekend of augmenting crowd noise on game broadcasts is to emphasize optimism.

Caputo said that, by default, hometown crowds believe something good is going to happen. When a quarterback rolls out, for example, excitement builds.

“I felt like our operators were sometimes waiting for the ball to be caught or be incomplete and then saying, ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay,’ ” Caputo said of Week 1. “When you think about it, being in the stands, you see a receiver down the field, when it is halfway there, you start cheering positively. Hometown fans are optimistic.”

Jets fans, of course, might challenge that premise.

With the Gang Green’s home opener on Sunday against the 49ers, the familiar sounds of “J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets,” should be heard. Nevertheless, even with Adam Gase already on the hot seat, don’t expect cascading jeers.

“We are not going to boo a home team incessantly,” Caputo said. “That’s not going to happen. We do have boos. It is really reserved for a call that goes against your team or something like that.”

Viewers hear on TV hear more enhanced sound than players and personnel in the actual stadium. The NFL Films crowd noise is not played at the venues.

“It was pretty quiet,” Giants receiver Darius Slayton, who scored two touchdowns against the Steelers on Monday night at MetLife Stadium. “It was really nothing going on in the stadium beyond us, so you could hear everything. It was a little weird scoring a touchdown and it was like crickets.”

There is a little ambience for the players. On Sunday, the MetLife Stadium operations will have a public address announcer, music and the ability to play “J-E-T-S, Jets! Jets! Jets!” This will be heard by anyone in the stadium. The sounds will be audible on the telecast, as well.

Nevertheless, when fans watch TV, the in-stadium effects will be complemented by an NFL-sanctioned official working with a system hitting crowd noise buttons to correspond with the action.

During the project, the NFL hired local people, who were fans of the team in each market and provided them a unique briefcase of sounds. So, for example, the Jets’ system is completely different from the Giants and operated by a different person.

The enhanced broadcast noise is all the result of an arduous process that began in June with a combination of NFL Films, NFL broadcasting and Robert Brock from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Arizona, among those working together.

In June, Onnie Bose, a VP for NFL broadcasting, asked Caputo what his group had in terms of resources. The goal was to prepare in case fans were not in the stands.

NFL Films happened to have just completed a four-year project in which they had collected crowd noise from all the NFL stadiums.

Films needed to take hundreds of hours to strip the crowd noise from the in-stadium music, public address, etc. that was recorded as they made their prototype which was built off M&T Stadium, home of the Ravens.

The eventual result was every team has its own team-specific stadium briefcase of sounds, even Vegas and Los Angeles, which have new homes.

The league declined to make available the Giants and Jets officials who are working the systems.

The operator has a lot of responsibility. In the opening week, Caputo said the difference from game-to-game was due to the operators learning on the job without spring training.

In Week 1, adept listeners heard how the NFL adapted from the early games leading into “Sunday Night Football” on NBC, which Caputo thought was the league’s best-sounding fan-less game.

“We learned so much on Sunday,” Caputo said. “I think it got better throughout the day. I think our best game of the day was the Sunday night game. We had kind of picked up a lot of intel during the day and shared it with the operator at night.”

— Additional reporting by Ryan Dunleavy