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Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
My TV already has a digital filter. Its called the off switch.
person who doesn't find the noise annoying? (Just curious.)
Yep, we were all thinking the noise could be filtered, this guy just was the first to act.
1. Cricket bat.
2. Hearing Aid.
3. Petrol funnel.
4. Water sprayer. (force trumpet side down into water)
5. Drinking funnel. Nuff said.
6. 4G mobile communication
7. Walking stick,
8. Light saber. (Just insert a torch) as seen on Starwars...
9. Jousting Stick (simply insert one into another.)
10. And of coarse... supporting any team/thing you like...
there is no spoon. or fork. there is a butter knife, and it's dull.
Because it is something foreign, and probably also because it is African, they're all upset.
Bull shit.
People are upset because the noise is extremely distracting, conveys nothing about the fans' excitement with the game, and according to a South African audiologist who was on the news yesterday, the sound is well past the threshold for causing hearing damage.
It would be one thing if the sound changed to reflect the excitement of the crowd during the game, but it doesn't. It's just a constant loud wall of sound at basically the same level from the start of the game to the end.
It's similar in level and monotony to running jet engines at full throttle on test stands in the stadium, throughout the entire game. It doesn't add, it detracts.
What you are saying is that traditions have to be respected, no matter how stupid or disruptive they are.
I propose an alternative. All other countries should create a tradition of randomly setting explosive charges off in their stadiums whenever the South African team is there.
It's our tradition, and you have to respect it.
Putting moderation advice in your
Me and my friend made a Puredata patch (http://puredata.info) to filter the vuvuzela sound. You have the ability to choose the sound also, making it more dynamic.
check it at http://joaomartins.entropiadesign.org/2010/06/15/vuvuzela-filter-a-puredata-approach/
When the World Cup started, I thought of playing around with notch filters to remove the noise, but the whole thing just reeked of effort. The human brain is actually pretty good at filtering out noise if you give it a chance. Just watch the games and don't worry about the vuvuzelas and before long you won't even notice them. I don't. It's a lot like what happens when you live next to a highway.
The BBC themselves has an article up (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8738604.stm) about the ineffectiveness of this filter, the issues filtering out the noise of vuluzelas could cause for the coverage in general, and the rest of their own good reasons for NOT using this shim.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
Chatroulette and sports broadcasters all trying to filter out the horn on the same day?
I wrote up a blog post about using Sound eXchange (sox) to filter the sound here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/linux-command-line-streaming-vuvuzela-filter , but the short version is this:
rec -d vol .5 equalizer 233 .1o -48 equalizer 466 .03o -48 equalizer 932 .02o -48 equalizer 1864 .2o -24 | play -d
or from a response to my post here: http://www.yusufk.za.net/?p=520
rec -d | play -d vol 0.9 bandreject 116.56 3.4q bandreject 233.12 3.4q bandreject 466.24 3.4q bandreject 932.48 3.4q bandreject 1864 3.4q
After testing, I feel the parameters could be tweaked a bit more - but these definitely make a difference.
-Russ
Me
No, so you can watch the entire game without a beehive buzzing in your ear. Come to think of it, this will probably resolve on it's own via the advertisers. When they figure out everyone is muting the game, and no one can hear their ads as a result, you can bet pressure will be applied on the stadiums to ban them. Although there may be thousands who go to the game to watch, there are millions made on commercials from the millions of viewers who catch the game on TV.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPVlAhK2j2o Watch that !
well, its a bit geeky, but it is cross platform and open source :D
Call me when it works on Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
An earlier poster wrote:
I've seen a lot of comments around the Internet insinuating that if you hate the sound of vuvuzelas, then you're a colonial racist who hates South African culture.
The funny thing is that the vuvuzelas are a recent introduction into South African culture. They are not only post-Colonial, they are post-Apartheid.
The maker of the horns admits that the prototype came from the USA... http://www.boogieblast.co.za/vuvuzela.htm
and this has been known in wider soccer circles for at least a year... http://www.footballiscominghome.net/the-hosts/the-vuvuzela/
and while the plastic horns have been around since the late 90s in South Africa... http://www.southafrica.info/2010/vuvuzela.htm
the current mass-producer only started up in 2001... http://www.vuvuzelas.com/about.html
Additionally, there's the blaringly obvious notion that the vuvuzela looks nothing like the kudu horn it allegedly comes from and looks everything like a cheap rip-off of the sort of long thin horns you see draped with flags playing fanfares when kings enter in films set in the middle ages, but I suppose it's expecting a lot for everyone to think critically. Last time I checked, kudu horns didn't have embouchures, either, which is what allows the plastic horn blowers to last all game.
That's probably because most of them don't speek geek. I find that people who are not very tech savvy seem to filter out geek. They also tend to have a clueless look on their face after you have explained a simple concept that a 5th grader should be able to understand.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
As a South African, I wholeheartedly support anything that annoys the opposition.
Just don't expect "the opposition" to bring their shows to your country anytime soon. No FIFA, no Olympics, no big international events of any type. They're all gonna watch at these broadcasts, listen to the worldwide complaints, and mark "don't broadcast events from here" with an arrow pointing to South Africa on their maps of the world.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
after listening to the "before" and "after" application of the notch filter, I quickly noticed that when you removed the vuvu's, you ended up with a slightly quieter, equally annoying general sound of the crowd.
The announcer really wasn't any easier to understand when the vuvus were removed. The audio's average level was just a little lower. (which did make it slightly easier on the ears)
Not much of an improvement. I can't imagine them banning vuvus would have much of an impact on the game -- for example, the crowd noise itself would be almost equally effective at preventing the players from communicating. So unless you're going to surround the pitch with a Cone of Silence, you're just going to have to deal with noise, whether you're on the pitch or behind the big screen.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I fell asleep on the couch watching a game the other night... I woke up from a nightmare of being attacked by giant bees.
I can't imagine them banning vuvus would have much of an impact on the game -- for example, the crowd noise itself would be almost equally effective at preventing the players from communicating
Actually, it is much worse than normal crowd noise - they have already shown that a vuduzela can generate 125dB from 1m. 40,000 of those things can most definitely cause a level of hearing damage that normal cheering cannot.
I was in one of the louder indoor arenas (the HP Pavilion in San Jose) when it got over 105dB in the NHL playoffs - that was enough to cause my eardrums to literally start clipping, and a bit of pain after a while. I couldn't imagine 125+ dB for almost 2 hours straight...
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." ~ Earnest Hemingway
(Full disclosure: I race motorcycles.)
batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used
considering the number of them going off at once (hundred thousand or so?) and the fact that they're all fairly close to the same frequency already, statistically there's already another one going off that's 180 deg of phase of any one you look at.
None of that matters though. For one, the location of the observer is important for phase cancellation. These flakes are everywhere in the crowd. Echoes also get around the effect.
anyway, there are so many reasons that won't work I'm somewhat at a loss for where to start, but that's best effort off the cuff in simple terms.
If you want to try a really freaky experiment though with cancellation, find two people that can whistle well, that have a fine degree of control over their whistle. Have one strike a very stable tone. Have the other try to match it. When they get to within less than a cycle of each other, it produces a very interesting moving zero-beat. At that point it becomes a challenge to hold, because BOTH whistlers will start periodically losing the ability to hear their own whistle, and that loss of self-feedback tends to make them drift. ("I'm blowing, but I don't HEAR anything") A third person observing will not hear two whistlers, but instead hears the source of the whistle appear to float back and forth between the two whistlers, sometimes very slowly, even to the point of outright stopping between the two, even if at a distance of several feet.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
then you have the attention span of a piece of lawn furniture.
My lawn furniture is extremely patient, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I wonder how long before half of what one sees and hears in supposedly "live" TV has been digitally massaged in some manner.
You could take out ugly buildings to make a scene more aesthetically pleasing, notch out one particular persons voice, or remove an 'annoying' five seconds of tape.
This subtle dichotomy between actual real life and tv "real life" could widen to the point of audiences being fed the "Leave it to Beaver" version of the real. We're generally already pissed off enough that our lives don't match the fake TV shows but this could bring a whole new level of cognitive dissonance, since these are supposedly "live" evens.
The horns are there, in the stadium. They may be annoying but they are part of the event. I guess if it turns cloudy, perhaps they can photoshop in some blue sky...
Regards.
You'll have 15,000 fans all blowing Didgeridoos.
That would be true, were it not for the fact that, unlike most US sports, there aren't many ad breaks in a soccer game. Also, in the UK many of the games are on the BBC, and the BBC doesn't openly advertise -- there's no actual commercial breaks, and all its advertising is done unethically, through covert product placement -- since it's forbidden from advertising. Not that that stops them.
You should turn on the subtitles:
..damned slashdot not allowing caps-lock.
"bbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
All broadcasters have extensive filters in their studios. It is trivially easy for a sound engineer to notch out the horns.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Get a brewery to start giving them away with every case of beer sold.
I don't give a shit about what people do in SA. What gets on my nuts is drunk Germans running around in Germany after a game, blowing into plastic horns. The traditional "driving around in your car while randomly hitting the horn" has the advantage of the idiots moving fast enough that they're out of earshot after a few seconds.
This has nothing to do with South Africa. It has everything to do with annoying pricks now having a new toy to annoy the crap out of me with. I wish you a great World Cup, really. You're not at fault for so many soccer fans being adult-sized noisy brats. But don't expect me to not complain when you give the not-so-little pests new weapons of mass annoyance.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)