digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: To make the most noise as a fan, yell at the top of your lungs, since yelling was the loudest option among the common cheers tested, while clapping was the quietest. The creator's experiment measured loudness from center field with three fans seated in 12 stadium locations, scaling their results to a full 94,000-person crowd. The strongest result was the air horn, followed closely by a lung-powered kazoo-like noisemaker, while yelling tied for third place.
Key Points
- Sound is cumulative, so the total noise depends on getting everyone in the crowd to participate, not just a few loud individuals.
- Loudness was measured instead of decibels, because loudness accounts for how the human ear perceives different frequencies as louder or quieter at the same decibel level.
- Cupping your hands or using a cone made little difference from farther away, since the voice spreads in all directions once it leaves the cone.
- Loud crowd noise can affect the game itself: the creator notes the Seahawks held the world record for the loudest stadium and also have the most false start penalties by a comfortable margin.
- The vuvuzela and cowbell ranked in fifth place, and the creator found the vuvuzela less loud to the ear than expected despite its constant drone.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Use an air horn for the loudest result, or a lung-powered kazoo-like noisemaker as a close second. Yell at the top of your lungs rather than only clapping, and avoid relying on clapping, which ranked last. Do not expect cupping your hands or a cone to help much when you are far from the field. Get as many people as possible to join in, since sound adds up across the crowd.
- Cheap lung-powered noisemakers can be bought online for about $100 per thousand, according to the creator, and he jokingly suggested a student section could pool money to buy them, while noting he's not advocating this.
- Rankings from the test, from loudest to quietest in the portion discussed: air horn first, lung-powered noisemaker second, yelling third (tied with cupping or using a cone), vuvuzela and cowbell fifth (tied), booing seventh, ThunderStick eighth, and clapping last.
- The creator says few sporting leagues have explicit rules against noisemakers because they are hard to enforce, and he does not advocate using them.
Bottom Line
Yelling and loud noisemakers, especially an air horn, beat clapping for making noise, and the creator's tests suggest crowd participation matters more than any single cheering technique.
