The World Series just ended, so let’s focus on Europe—sports hooligans!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Dutch acoustics engineers — Sander van Wijngaarden and Johan van Balkan — were soccer fans. Very annoyed soccer fans.
The problem? Negative fan chanting. That’s a feedback loop of rising and falling sounds that tell chanters when to yell and when to shush.
The two realized they could disrupt that feedback by blasting their own chants back at the hooligans—but out of time.
In system tests, a delay of just two tenths of a second was enough to confuse a crowd and shut up even the most persistent fans.
Ending that hooliganery. Or in the original Dutch, “hooliganery.” In Los Angeles, we just say: “Go, Mookie!”