Tooting A Vuvuzela in Capetown
creative commons, Flowcomm on Flickr
A lawn mower pumps out 90 decibels. A chainsaw, 100 decibels. But the noisemaker of choice at the World Cup, the cheap plastic one-note wonder that is the vuvuzela puts out an astonishing 127 decibels. The Decibel scale is logarithmic; an increase in 10 is a doubling of the volume. at 100 decibels you can get hearing damage in 15 minutes.
The New Scientist explains why they are so loud:
The loudness can be explained by the bore shape, which is roughly conical, and flares. As well as creating sound at a frequency of 235 hertz, the instrument generates harmonics - sound at multiples of the fundamental frequency. We have measured strong harmonics at 470, 700, 940, 1171, 1400 and 1630 hertz.
It is also really annoying. The New Scientist explains why:
Experiments on other noise sources show that louder sounds are more annoying. Our hearing is an early-warning system: we listen out for sudden changes in the sounds around us which might indicate threats, and ignore benign, persistent noise. When noise becomes as loud as a vuvuzela, however, it becomes impossible to habituate to the sound.
So if you are in the stands, put in earplugs or you may live with the results for a long time; if you are at home watching on TV or your computer, there are a number of things you can do:
1) Go into your equalizer:
On most computers it is easy to get into the equalizer and turn down the bands containing the killer frequency, 235 hertz, and the harmonics at 470, 700, 940, 1171, 1400 and 1630 hertz. (at least it used to be easy in Windows, I can't find it in a mac)
2) The Centre for Digital Music of the University of London has developed a plugin for mac and windows that cuts it out, available here. Requires some skill.
3) Purchase a noise cancellation program. the Anti-vuvuzela filter "is a wave with the same amplitude but with inverted phase to the original sound.The waves combine to form a new wave, in a process called interference, and effectively cancel each other out -an effect which is called phase cancellation." You set up a stereo next to your TV and play this MP3. They say that "the resulting soundwave may be so faint as to be inaudible to human ears. [url='http://antivuvuzelafilter.com/']2.95
Vuvuzela Orchestra Demo from Pedro Espi-Sanchis on Vimeo.
4) Learn to love the vuvuzela. The Centre for Digital Music points us to the Vuvuzela Orchestra, which "makes music with tuned vuvuzelas and brings in the standard vuvuzelas to make rhythms in the songs."
