The Final Soundtrack

july 14, 2010.

As an hommage to the Vuvuzela, this SoundBlog edition proudly presents _Finale_: the full soundtrack of the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup final between the Netherlands and Spain, slightly (but ever so subtly) edited [re-composed], for an optimal listening experience. The match was played in the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, on sunday July 11th, before a crowd of 84.490 soccer fans. Referee was Howard Webb.

The mp3 file's total playing time is 2 hours and 2 minutes.
File size is 112 Mb.

_Finale_ has five movements:
1. First half [ 45'02" ] 2. Second half [ 45'42" ] 3. First half e.t. [ 15'31" ] 4. Second half e.t. [ 12'27" ] 5. Epilogue [ 3'55" ]

Here is how I re-composed this World Cup final's soundtrack: by hand I cut out (most of) the referee's loud whistle blowing that continuously interrupts the game, except for his start and end whistle, which I kept to mark beginning and end of each of the first four movements. I also removed the stadium announcements, some (but not all) of the in-field and sideline shouting, and left only a couple of the ball-kick ('pok') sounds, to which I added delay to mark sections within each of the movements. In each of the first four movements there are some vuvuzela patterns that I emphasize ('musicalize') by repeating them. In the fourth section, with the score continuing to be a non-conclusive 0-0, the tension of the approaching end of time drives the 'orchestra'-dynamics to near-explosive heights. This section ends with the outburst of the crowd when Andrés Iniesta marks Spain's match winning goal. It is followed by a 4 minute Epilogue, a dazzling chronological collage of all the referee whistles and ball kicks that I cut out.

[ I recorded the original sound file of the wc2010 final match from its live videocast - without commentary - on the Eurovisionsports web site onto a Zoom digital recorder. It took me about 23 hours of editing to prepare the file for _Finale_ according to the above plan. If you download the track and enjoy the work, do consider donating a small sum via PayPal to keep the SoundBlog going ... ]

Feel free to re-mix!

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Added September 2010: The fine Dutch cultural web daily Hard/Hoofd re-published my Final Soundtrack, and uploaded the full file to SoundCloud:

Added July 2017: More soccer on the SoundBlog - Le zida ne passera pas par moi ... :

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tags: football, world cup, final

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