I must admit, I wondered what the bloody noise was when I watched the first World Cup match on TV last week.
Vuvuzela – With Moron Attached
Over the years, I’ve gotten used to silly noises at International football matches on TV. It used to be an artefact of the satellite technology, or the way the microphones were placed when a match was to be broadcast via satellite. Annoying buzzing, humming, or constant whining.
Then, of course, you have to allow for the apparently normal behaviour of people from different cultures. It might seem strange to us, but in other countries it is perfectly acceptable to attend a football match and spend the full 90 minutes banging a drum or blowing a trumpet. Over here, we just ban anything that might get thrown on the pitch or be used to stab someone by some Neanderthal, but in countries like Brazil taking enough equipment to furnish the brass and percussion sections of an orchestra is almost compulsory; and let’s not forget Spain and Italy (well, most of Europe, actually), where you are allowed to take high explosives into the ground and throw them at the players or use them to set fire to the stands.
And so it seems that in South Africa people are born with vuvuzelas for brains.
The BBC spent most of last week egging the locals on to blow the damned things (and do tribal dances, of course) for its kitsch breakfast bulletins. I guess it was cute and very ethnic. But some things can get very old very quickly indeed.
The vuvuzela is one of them.
The noise is completely ruining TV coverage, and it has to rate as one of the most annoying types of noise, because it is constant. It became annoying after about 2 minutes of the opening match, and it has got worse ever since. And it seems that – according to Sky, and other sources – they are looking for ways to cut out the noise of the things. The organisers have refused to ban them in situ according to the arch-instigators at the BBC.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of impaired mentality required to stand there for the whole match blowing the damned things (‘juvenile’ springs to mind). I’m not sure how they work – I’ll be generous and assume that there is a reed or something that generates the sound, but if it turned out that you blow them like trumpets (which requires ten times the effort) then the situation is much worse.
But I mentioned the BBC and its childish efforts to get the South African locals to behave in stereotypical ways before the first match, last week. The organisers are also surely at fault for coming up with a stereotypical, and highly annoying, gimmick to show up their country.
EDIT 16/06/2010: A reader has contacted me with this advice – it seems the noise of those damned horns is driving everyone mad. He suggests a way of reducing the effect:
Essentially, the idea is to use the equaliser on your audio out device (TV/Amp/PC etc) to cut/reduce the 300hz range.
He also provides a link to a site which discusses the problem (on Samsung TVs) and one to a YouTube video which goes into some technical detail.
I have an LG, and unfortunately it doesn’t have an equaliser as such, but you can mess with the bass and treble to create different profiles, and there are various pre-defined profiles. Based on the reader’s suggestion I have tried it and it does work – it certainly makes the noise less intrusive. The Music profile works best on my LG. If you don’t have equalisation settings, try dropping the bass level right down and bringing the treble up.
Thanks for that, Neil.