I was at a football game recently sitting towards the top like this.
And I found myself clapping and I thought 'Wait, does this even matter? Like can they even hear a clap
from way dow there on the field?'
if our goal as fans much noise as possible, what is the
scientifically proven the best way to do that?
Do you stomp or yell, and should you
yell be high-pitched or low pitch? Does
cupping your hands make a difference?
What about one of these? Or this? Or one
of these? And should the cheering at the
change depending on where your seats are?
I had some guesses, so as a firm believer
in the scientific method, I decided to
test my hypothesis.
So I've got a control
group of three fans- AHAHAH. It's some real nice
audio equipment, so they are going to
sit in a bunch of different seats all
over the stadium and cheer in all the
different possible ways and then we're
gonna analyze which cheers are the
loudest from down here on the field.
But first I needed a baseline to compare our
cheering too. And since I attended grad
school at USC, they let me come back to
the Coliseum to take some measurements.
And while everyone else was enjoying the game,
I was dutifully collecting audio data.
Mostly.
So now that I've got my baseline for the
full stadium, I think it's time to do our
experiment in the empty stadium. You guys ready?
YEEAAHHHH!!!!
So our fans stood in 12 different
locations throughout the stadium, and in
each location they cycle through the same 11 cheers.
And then me my buddy Marcelo,
who happens to have a PhD in
acoustics, stood at center field and
recorded the data.
Ok so we're finished
and we're currently processing the data.
But before we state the results, I think
it's important to review the science
behind how hearing works.
Your eardrums are
fancy biological sensors that tell
you if anything is pushing on them.
It's like if you blow on the back of your
hand, you can feel the pressure from the
blown air only your eardrums are
millions of times more sensitive than that.
So these guys represent individual
air molecules. And when you hear that
lovely bird chirping, what's actually
happening is the birds throat is moving
and it pushes the air molecules right
next to it. Which pushes the molecules
next to it and causes a chain reaction
called a longitudinal wave. And those
crashes keep happening until they crash
into the air molecules in your ear canal,
which then crash into your eardrum,
causing it to move just a little.
And depending on
the pattern of
movement from the repeated crashes, your
brain is like, "oh I recognize that as a
bird chirp." And if the molecules are
crashing it at a high frequency we hear
that as a high pitch, and if they're
crashing it is a low frequency, we hear
that as a low pitch. And the greater
distance your eardrum gets pushed in, our
brain registers that as a loud sound. Okay,
now for the results.
For starters here is the baselines for the loudest sounds
I recorded at the actual game.
And then for comparison we took the recorded sound
measurements from our three fans, and
scaled them up. So this is how loud it
would be if all 94 thousand people in
the Coliseum were clapping at once. Not
surprisingly clapping is in last place
as far as loudness of all the cheers go.
Next up in 8th place are these
ThunderStick things. They look sort of
obnoxious, but they're not actually that loud.
And now in seventh we have
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
booing. Which was a bit surprising to me
it was so low in the rankings. And as you
can see we are now louder than the max
sounds I recorded at the game. And this
makes sense, because you never actually
have all 94 thousand people cheering at
the same time. Which raises sort of an
obvious observation which is that sound
is cumulative. So you want to make sure
everybody is pitching in. Next up we have
a tie for fifth place between the
cowbell and the boo-boos. And this was
again a surprise to me because I
remember the constant drone
from all of the vuvuzelas from the 2010
world cup. But when we were standing at
center field, we definitely agreed it
wasn't as loud as some of the other
cheering. I think they're just really easy
for one person to make a long sustained
noise with, and so when you have a couple
thousand people with them you get this
constant drone, but it's not actually
that loud of the human ear which brings
up a good point we are measuring
loudness here, and not the typical sound
pressure or decibel. Decibels aren't
actually that great for measuring how a
human ear perceives sound, because of the
constant decibel level we actually
perceive certain frequencies as louder
than others. Loudness accounts for that.
So it's a better measurement of what you
would actually here down here on the field.
Additionally, the loudness scale is
linear. So if you double the loudness,
that would mean in real life it would
seem twice as loud. And in third place, we
have another tie between screaming at
the top of your lungs without a cone or
cupping in your hands, and screaming at the
top of your lungs with cupping your
hands or using a cone. And this seemed
counter-intuitive at first, until we
notice the effect of the cone was only
slightly more pronounced when you were
really close to the field. So the further
from the field you are, the less of a
difference it makes. Because as soon as
your voice leaves the cone, the pressure
wave propagates in all directions. So
it's diffused by the time it hits the
field either way. It is encouraging
though that from the perspective of the
players on the field yelling at the top
of your lungs is more effective than all
this other stuff. Okay so to set the
stage for the first and second loudest
cheer, remember that in a sport like
American football your goal as a fan is
to make so much noise that the players
eardrums are moving in and out so much
that they can't sense the smaller
eardrum movements of the snap count.
And so they fall start and get a penalty.
This is why the Seahawks recently
held the world record for the loudest stadium.
And also have the most false start
penalties by a comfortable margin.
Which means the fans are directly affecting
the outcome of the game.
And so finally, sort of not surprisingly, in first place
we have the air horn. But a very close
second place, was one of these weird things.
It's sort of like a kazoo on steroids.
It's nearly as loud as an air horn,
but it's small and discreet.
And it's powered by your own lungs.
Very few sporting leagues have explicit rules
against noise makers, because they're
hard to enforce. And so I'm not
advocating this, but I'll simply point
out that these things are really cheap,
and a student section could pitch in and
get a thousand of these things for about
a hundred bucks online.
*Evil Whistling*
So that, cold art science fun on cheering. But it's thorough
man of science we knew there was one
final scenario we needed a test, for all
those watching the game at home.
OH COME ON!!!!!!!
YOU CAN'T RUN THE BALL ON THIRD
???
YOU GOTTA THROW IT!
You hear anything Marcelo?
*Shakes Head*
Sorry.
Wait, you spelled "subscribing" wrong.
I want to quickly
Audible for sponsoring this video.
One of the most notable USC alumni was a guy
named Louie Zamperini. He was sort of an
accidental olympian who ended up serving
in World War II. Where his plane went
down in the ocean, most died in the crash.
But he survived and they ended up living
off raw fish and stray birds for over a