8 ms·

How to Silence Vuvuzela Horns in World Cup Broadcasts

124 points by nreece 16y ago

fname 16y ago
There's also this -- antivuvuzelafilter.com -- a noise canceling MP3 for ~$4.00. EDIT: Yup, you're right. Wasn't until I read more into the details did I notice what they were doing. Killing the hyperlink to post http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela instead.
- gojomo 16y ago
  Any evidence this isn't a scam? I thought antinoise had to be in close sync with the source -- requiring an actively adjusting system, rather than a static MP3.
  - ars 16y ago
    Well, you sort of could use a static MP3, as long as you had some way of adjusting the phase - i.e. pause/unpause it for a moment, randomly till you get it to match.
    - jerf 16y ago
      That will work for an absolutely rigidly pure sine wave of identical frequency, and even then produces a cancellation moire pattern like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-ripple-tank.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-rip... , not universal cancellation. Any frequency deviation whatsoever will produce something different. Trying to use this technique to "cancel" things that aren't sine waves and aren't even constant frequencies won't have any cancellation effect, it'll simply be two sounds instead of one. (Record yourself saying something. Record yourself saying it again. Flip the phase of one of them and add them to each other. You can do this until the sun goes out, you'll never get a "cancellation", you'll just get two voices. A nice effect in some cases, it's one of my favorite things about 60s pop music even if it got overdone to the point of cliche, but not cancellation.) Or, to say it another way, that won't work. It is not possible to universally cancel one wave with another not in the same position. Noise-cancelling headphones work by, with great effort and with some fast processing, creating a small zone where frequencies human ears can hear are dampened to a significant degree where the eardrum is. This comes at the cost of making it louder in places where the ear drum isn't (which we don't care about), and IIRC at the cost of some very high frequency noise well above what we can hear (which we also don't care about). In a way, it's fair to say they barely work; not in the sense that they are poorly manufactured or anything, but that it takes great cleverness to get something that works even as well as they do. There's a reason why they only came to be very recently; it isn't anywhere near as easy as sticking a microphone on the outside, inverting the signal, and playing the inverted signal on a headphone speaker, which could have been done decades ago. That, too, will produce some exciting acoustic effects, but will only cancel a very small and effectively random suite of frequencies, and you won't find it useful in general. Noise cancellation is just shy of impossible, and only works with some heavy caveats, like having the cancellation equipment extremely proximal to the audio receiver (ears in our case).
- jerf 16y ago
  Uh, no, that won't work at all. You can't noise cancel something without dynamically responding to it somehow.
robotkad 16y ago
It seems odd that broadcasters wouldn't do this given its such an easy EQ hack.
- neilc 16y ago
  It's not entirely clear that the audience want broadcasters to do this: while I certainly find it annoying, there are those who think it is part of the atmosphere of the game.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    It might be part of the atmosphere of these games as played in SA, but it's not generally part of the game elsewhere, and it drowns out the slightly more subtle aspects of crowd noise, not to mention reducing the ability of players on the pitch to communicate - harming the quality of the football.
- nreece 16y ago
  Host Broadcast Services, the company that provides the broadcast feed for the World Cup, said Tuesday it has doubled its audio filters to reduce the constant blaring buzz of vuvuzelas. Ref: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce/us/bbc-mulls-vuvuzela-free-option-viewers?ver=us&cc=3436 http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce...
- marcusbooster 16y ago
  Before going to the Brazil/North Korea match, the ESPN announcers said they adding extra audio filters to cut down the sound.
- petercooper 16y ago
  I can see the future: TVs will come with a Safari Reader-like "Watchability" option that wipes out background images and noise and flattens out imperfections in faces and bodies.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
najirama 16y ago
I absolutely LOVE the sound of these Vuvuzelas - I don't understand why there is such a fuss over them. I find the drone puts me into an almost trance-like state where my focus and concentration abilities increase dramatically. I imagine I'd quite like having these things blaring while playing on such a grand stage as the World Cup.
- zalew 16y ago
  I love stadium sounds and I usually hate when broadcasters cut out all the crowd singing, etc. BUT the vuvuzelas are in such number than instead of making single horn sounds it's just a 100% BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz all the game. When you watch one game, it's ok, when you watch more, or all the games, it's annoying as hell, rly.
  - kilps 16y ago
    It's very different when you're at the game - the vuvuzelas near you are distinguishable and you can hear people singing. Obviously that's not ideal for watching it on tv - the vuvuzelas tend to drown everything else out when it's all recorded - but I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, because there's no way that anyone here in South Africa would accept a ban.
    - rue 16y ago
      The obvious - and implemented - solution is to adjust the audio signal for TV viewers. Everyone wins.
- prawn 16y ago
  Not an apiarist by any chance are you? ;)
- dejb 16y ago
  I prefer the other sounds that crowds make such as cheering, booing, singing, playing drums, banging the stands in sync, the occasional trumpet. The Vuvuzela totally blocks all of these out, replacing them with a monotone buzz. To me it destroys a lot of what is great about watching soccer.
mortenjorck 16y ago
There was a thread at a music production forum I frequent on a specific Audio Unit plugin (Mac only, I think) from Prosoniq that does more than just a band pass, but performs some kind of heuristics to isolate the specific sound and remove it without cutting other sounds that overlap that frequency (such as announcer voices). I haven't tried it, but it has its own site: http://www.vuvux.com/ http://www.vuvux.com/ It's free; it appears to be a rather clever "vuvuzela only" demo of their full de-mixing package.
- LiamAnderson 16y ago
  There's also these Waves presets for anyone owning waves plugins http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798 http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798
raeez 16y ago
As a south african having grown up with vuvzela's present at every sport match, the present worldwide 'outcry' is quite entertaining. Don't you just love the smell of globalization in the morning?
- pkulak 16y ago
  What's the point? I mean, why blow on one of those things all match long? I go to American football games and make a lot of noise, but only when the opposing offense is lined up to try to get them offside. Otherwise the stadium is silent. What is the point of constant noise during the entire game?
  - verisimilitude 16y ago
    Questioning the purpose of things never seems to go well when the topic is sports -- the purpose of the whole thing is fun.
    - pkulak 16y ago
      I guess I just wonder why laying on a one-note horn for 2 hours is fun.
      - Tichy 16y ago
        Only one way to find out: try it yourself :-)
      - jcl 16y ago
        I expect that this is akin to wondering why anyone would want to go to a concert and lay on their camera's flash for two hours to create that annoying "continuous strobe" effect. :)
      - nollidge 16y ago
        I don't think anyone does, it's just the additive effect of 30,000 people blowing them at random intervals is a constant buzz (particularly on TV, when there's no direction to the audio).
crocowhile 16y ago
I am surprise no broadcaster is still offering a vuvuzela filtered match yet. edit: ah ok: they are actually doing that. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce/us/bbc-mulls-vuvuzela-free-option-viewers?cc=5739&ver=global http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce...
patio11 16y ago
There's a cultural studies paper for anyone who wants it in software programmers versus throngs of Africans with 5 cent plastic noisemakers. "Subjugation By Software: How Tech-Savvy Westerners Wrote Africans Out Of The World Cup In Real Time" would pick up plenty of citations.
- helium 16y ago
  More like: "How Tech-Savvy Westerners found a way to satisfy their complete cultural ignorance and inability to accept or understand cultures other than their own"
  - dantheman 16y ago
    And of course the follow up -- how long does something need to exist before cultural relativism kicks in. 20 years? Originally made out of tin, the vuvuzela became popular in South Africa in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela#Use_outside_football_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela#Use_outside_football_g...
    - tomhoward 16y ago
      According to the WP article "This type of plastic horn or trumpet has been used in Mexican stadiums since the 1970s." I remember them being used at cricket & football matches here in Australia in the 80s, till they were banned for being too annoying, just as they should have been in South Africa before this rot set in.
  - tomhoward 16y ago
    Speaking of "complete cultural ignorance", you might want to do a little research into South Africa's long, splendid history of singing at public events, which at the football at least, the vuvuzela has largely destroyed.
    - helium 16y ago
      No need to do research. I am South African, I live in Johannesburg. I was at a world cup game on Monday (Netherlands vs Denmark at Soccer City). The atmosphere was amazing, partly because of the vuvuzelas. I don't care about the history, they are part and parcel of South African soccer at present, and makes this world cup unique.
fhars 16y ago
If you ask google for mplayer sinesuppress you get a whole page of command lines that remove vuvuzela sounds from broadcasts, for example: http://verbo.se/open-source-vuvuzela-killers http://verbo.se/open-source-vuvuzela-killers [edit: fixed link, this supid cell phone doesn't support copy&paste]
deadmansshoes 16y ago
My wife told me I was the most annoying person she'd ever known..I almost choked on my vuvuzela.
alrex021 16y ago
The unfortunate monotonous sound that is heard via the broadcast is nothing like what it sounds like in the stadium. I was at the Italy - Paraguay game and it was a very different, awesome, experience.
zephjc 16y ago
What, people don't like the sound of the swarms of killer 15 foot bees? Seriously, they should filter that mess out - it's headache-inducing. Maybe put the with-vuvuzela sounds on the SAP audio channel.
joubert 16y ago
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-CUP-2010-Vuvuzelas-selling-out.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-CUP-20...
- zackattack 16y ago
  I know this is totally unrelated, but this is a sports thread, and you recently recommended _Inner Game of Tennis_ to me. I just wanted to let you know that I read it and loved it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435488 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435488
kadhinn 16y ago
I understand that fans that excited but for those who are not in the stadium and watching on tv, I am even ready to pay my broadcaster if there is a way out to mute the honking sound or atleast keep it away when the commentators are talking!
pcc 16y ago
There's something rather poignant about this, both funny and sad. The world could choose any "negative" aspect of the modern South African situation to complain about and to try to develop nifty hacks for suppressing; like crime, violence, poverty, the brain drain, etc etc. But the one that's getting all the attention is that "annoying buzz on the world's TV sets."
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- pcc 16y ago
  Re the downvotes -- I guess this really just goes to show again that either (a) people really fundamentally care more about a 235Hz buzz on their TVs during soccer, than they do about real (by comparison) suffering as long as its someone else who's suffering; or (b) people would just far rather apply their brainpower to attenuating (or discussing the attenuation of) vuvuzelas, than to trying to solve actual issues that matter and would be of lasting value.

124 points by nreece 16y ago

fname 16y ago

There's also this -- antivuvuzelafilter.com -- a noise canceling MP3 for ~$4.00. EDIT: Yup, you're right. Wasn't until I read more into the details did I notice what they were doing. Killing the hyperlink to post http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela http://isophonics.net/content/whats-all-about-vuvuzela instead.

gojomo 16y ago
Any evidence this isn't a scam? I thought antinoise had to be in close sync with the source -- requiring an actively adjusting system, rather than a static MP3.
- ars 16y ago
  Well, you sort of could use a static MP3, as long as you had some way of adjusting the phase - i.e. pause/unpause it for a moment, randomly till you get it to match.
  - jerf 16y ago
    That will work for an absolutely rigidly pure sine wave of identical frequency, and even then produces a cancellation moire pattern like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-ripple-tank.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two-point-interference-rip... , not universal cancellation. Any frequency deviation whatsoever will produce something different. Trying to use this technique to "cancel" things that aren't sine waves and aren't even constant frequencies won't have any cancellation effect, it'll simply be two sounds instead of one. (Record yourself saying something. Record yourself saying it again. Flip the phase of one of them and add them to each other. You can do this until the sun goes out, you'll never get a "cancellation", you'll just get two voices. A nice effect in some cases, it's one of my favorite things about 60s pop music even if it got overdone to the point of cliche, but not cancellation.) Or, to say it another way, that won't work. It is not possible to universally cancel one wave with another not in the same position. Noise-cancelling headphones work by, with great effort and with some fast processing, creating a small zone where frequencies human ears can hear are dampened to a significant degree where the eardrum is. This comes at the cost of making it louder in places where the ear drum isn't (which we don't care about), and IIRC at the cost of some very high frequency noise well above what we can hear (which we also don't care about). In a way, it's fair to say they barely work; not in the sense that they are poorly manufactured or anything, but that it takes great cleverness to get something that works even as well as they do. There's a reason why they only came to be very recently; it isn't anywhere near as easy as sticking a microphone on the outside, inverting the signal, and playing the inverted signal on a headphone speaker, which could have been done decades ago. That, too, will produce some exciting acoustic effects, but will only cancel a very small and effectively random suite of frequencies, and you won't find it useful in general. Noise cancellation is just shy of impossible, and only works with some heavy caveats, like having the cancellation equipment extremely proximal to the audio receiver (ears in our case).
jerf 16y ago
Uh, no, that won't work at all. You can't noise cancel something without dynamically responding to it somehow.

robotkad 16y ago

It seems odd that broadcasters wouldn't do this given its such an easy EQ hack.

neilc 16y ago
It's not entirely clear that the audience want broadcasters to do this: while I certainly find it annoying, there are those who think it is part of the atmosphere of the game.
- barrkel 16y ago
  It might be part of the atmosphere of these games as played in SA, but it's not generally part of the game elsewhere, and it drowns out the slightly more subtle aspects of crowd noise, not to mention reducing the ability of players on the pitch to communicate - harming the quality of the football.
nreece 16y ago
Host Broadcast Services, the company that provides the broadcast feed for the World Cup, said Tuesday it has doubled its audio filters to reduce the constant blaring buzz of vuvuzelas. Ref: http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce/us/bbc-mulls-vuvuzela-free-option-viewers?ver=us&cc=3436 http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce...
marcusbooster 16y ago
Before going to the Brazil/North Korea match, the ESPN announcers said they adding extra audio filters to cut down the sound.
petercooper 16y ago
I can see the future: TVs will come with a Safari Reader-like "Watchability" option that wipes out background images and noise and flattens out imperfections in faces and bodies.
- jamesbritt 16y ago

najirama 16y ago

I absolutely LOVE the sound of these Vuvuzelas - I don't understand why there is such a fuss over them. I find the drone puts me into an almost trance-like state where my focus and concentration abilities increase dramatically. I imagine I'd quite like having these things blaring while playing on such a grand stage as the World Cup.

zalew 16y ago
I love stadium sounds and I usually hate when broadcasters cut out all the crowd singing, etc. BUT the vuvuzelas are in such number than instead of making single horn sounds it's just a 100% BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzz all the game. When you watch one game, it's ok, when you watch more, or all the games, it's annoying as hell, rly.
- kilps 16y ago
  It's very different when you're at the game - the vuvuzelas near you are distinguishable and you can hear people singing. Obviously that's not ideal for watching it on tv - the vuvuzelas tend to drown everything else out when it's all recorded - but I'm not sure what the ideal solution is, because there's no way that anyone here in South Africa would accept a ban.
  - rue 16y ago
    The obvious - and implemented - solution is to adjust the audio signal for TV viewers. Everyone wins.
prawn 16y ago
Not an apiarist by any chance are you? ;)
dejb 16y ago
I prefer the other sounds that crowds make such as cheering, booing, singing, playing drums, banging the stands in sync, the occasional trumpet. The Vuvuzela totally blocks all of these out, replacing them with a monotone buzz. To me it destroys a lot of what is great about watching soccer.

mortenjorck 16y ago

There was a thread at a music production forum I frequent on a specific Audio Unit plugin (Mac only, I think) from Prosoniq that does more than just a band pass, but performs some kind of heuristics to isolate the specific sound and remove it without cutting other sounds that overlap that frequency (such as announcer voices). I haven't tried it, but it has its own site: http://www.vuvux.com/ http://www.vuvux.com/ It's free; it appears to be a rather clever "vuvuzela only" demo of their full de-mixing package.

LiamAnderson 16y ago
There's also these Waves presets for anyone owning waves plugins http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798 http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798

raeez 16y ago

As a south african having grown up with vuvzela's present at every sport match, the present worldwide 'outcry' is quite entertaining. Don't you just love the smell of globalization in the morning?

pkulak 16y ago
What's the point? I mean, why blow on one of those things all match long? I go to American football games and make a lot of noise, but only when the opposing offense is lined up to try to get them offside. Otherwise the stadium is silent. What is the point of constant noise during the entire game?
- verisimilitude 16y ago
  Questioning the purpose of things never seems to go well when the topic is sports -- the purpose of the whole thing is fun.
  - pkulak 16y ago
    I guess I just wonder why laying on a one-note horn for 2 hours is fun.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      Only one way to find out: try it yourself :-)
    - jcl 16y ago
      I expect that this is akin to wondering why anyone would want to go to a concert and lay on their camera's flash for two hours to create that annoying "continuous strobe" effect. :)
    - nollidge 16y ago
      I don't think anyone does, it's just the additive effect of 30,000 people blowing them at random intervals is a constant buzz (particularly on TV, when there's no direction to the audio).

crocowhile 16y ago

I am surprise no broadcaster is still offering a vuvuzela filtered match yet. edit: ah ok: they are actually doing that. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce/us/bbc-mulls-vuvuzela-free-option-viewers?cc=5739&ver=global http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-cup/story/_/id/5287552/ce...

patio11 16y ago

There's a cultural studies paper for anyone who wants it in software programmers versus throngs of Africans with 5 cent plastic noisemakers. "Subjugation By Software: How Tech-Savvy Westerners Wrote Africans Out Of The World Cup In Real Time" would pick up plenty of citations.

helium 16y ago
More like: "How Tech-Savvy Westerners found a way to satisfy their complete cultural ignorance and inability to accept or understand cultures other than their own"
- dantheman 16y ago
  And of course the follow up -- how long does something need to exist before cultural relativism kicks in. 20 years? Originally made out of tin, the vuvuzela became popular in South Africa in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela#Use_outside_football_games http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela#Use_outside_football_g...
  - tomhoward 16y ago
    According to the WP article "This type of plastic horn or trumpet has been used in Mexican stadiums since the 1970s." I remember them being used at cricket & football matches here in Australia in the 80s, till they were banned for being too annoying, just as they should have been in South Africa before this rot set in.
- tomhoward 16y ago
  Speaking of "complete cultural ignorance", you might want to do a little research into South Africa's long, splendid history of singing at public events, which at the football at least, the vuvuzela has largely destroyed.
  - helium 16y ago
    No need to do research. I am South African, I live in Johannesburg. I was at a world cup game on Monday (Netherlands vs Denmark at Soccer City). The atmosphere was amazing, partly because of the vuvuzelas. I don't care about the history, they are part and parcel of South African soccer at present, and makes this world cup unique.

fhars 16y ago

If you ask google for mplayer sinesuppress you get a whole page of command lines that remove vuvuzela sounds from broadcasts, for example: http://verbo.se/open-source-vuvuzela-killers http://verbo.se/open-source-vuvuzela-killers [edit: fixed link, this supid cell phone doesn't support copy&paste]

deadmansshoes 16y ago

My wife told me I was the most annoying person she'd ever known..I almost choked on my vuvuzela.

alrex021 16y ago

The unfortunate monotonous sound that is heard via the broadcast is nothing like what it sounds like in the stadium. I was at the Italy - Paraguay game and it was a very different, awesome, experience.

zephjc 16y ago

What, people don't like the sound of the swarms of killer 15 foot bees? Seriously, they should filter that mess out - it's headache-inducing. Maybe put the with-vuvuzela sounds on the SAP audio channel.

joubert 16y ago

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-CUP-2010-Vuvuzelas-selling-out.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286912/WORLD-CUP-20...

zackattack 16y ago
I know this is totally unrelated, but this is a sports thread, and you recently recommended _Inner Game of Tennis_ to me. I just wanted to let you know that I read it and loved it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435488 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1435488

kadhinn 16y ago

I understand that fans that excited but for those who are not in the stadium and watching on tv, I am even ready to pay my broadcaster if there is a way out to mute the honking sound or atleast keep it away when the commentators are talking!

pcc 16y ago

There's something rather poignant about this, both funny and sad. The world could choose any "negative" aspect of the modern South African situation to complain about and to try to develop nifty hacks for suppressing; like crime, violence, poverty, the brain drain, etc etc. But the one that's getting all the attention is that "annoying buzz on the world's TV sets."

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
pcc 16y ago
Re the downvotes -- I guess this really just goes to show again that either (a) people really fundamentally care more about a 235Hz buzz on their TVs during soccer, than they do about real (by comparison) suffering as long as its someone else who's suffering; or (b) people would just far rather apply their brainpower to attenuating (or discussing the attenuation of) vuvuzelas, than to trying to solve actual issues that matter and would be of lasting value.