A basketball bounces twice. A shoe squeaks. Then, for half a second, everything goes quiet.
You can probably picture the room already.
I’d recognise the sound of an indoor riding arena from the corridor. The footing makes a different sound from the aisle. A horse goes past the door and gets quieter down the far side. If there’s another horse coming the other way, for a moment you can hear two rhythms at once.
It makes me wonder what other athletes can hear that I’d miss completely.
I hear shoes on a basketball court. A player might hear someone coming up behind them. I hear a tennis ball hit the strings. Someone who’s spent years on a court might already have an idea of how cleanly it was struck.
The other sound I like is the one that turns up in almost every sport.
A person does something difficult, finishes, and lets out a breath they’d been holding. Sometimes you can hear that better in a small training room than you ever could from the stands.
Try this with a clip from a sport you know. Play the first few seconds without looking. What tells you where you are? What could you tell had happened before you saw it?
And if you send it to a friend, give them a moment before you tell them what it is. I’d quite like to know what they heard first.
Read more from Sport Perspective.
Silvia
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