w0rd.ca

So I spent Friday evening watching the “riveting” tie between South Africa and Mexico, actually a decent game to start off the World Cup. I’m jazzed up, but am I the only one finding it annoying that instead of a killer cheer here and there throughout the 90 minutes of play, for the teams in attendace, my ears are drowned and battered by the sound of a bloody hive of bees?

Its the sound of the World Cup horn, or the “Vuvuzela” horn, like the kind the one fan from a CFL game brings to compensate for the lack of 35,000 other fans… This vuvuzela horn has been the only sound heard at World Cup 2010, as tens of thousands of South African fans take them to games, and blowthem as loudly and for as long as they can. So there is my point, its annoying as hell, but now its a danger? Read on.

What was just an annoying din, has now escalated into a health threat with authorities and specialists claiming that prolonged exposure to the noise emitted from the World Cup horn could result in hearing loss and in some cases deafness. Woooow.

To illustrate their point about the World Cup horn, they tested its output and found that the vuvuzela emits a noise at 127 decibels. At thatmeasurement, the vuvuzela is shockingly louder than a drum (122 decibels), and the ref’s whistle (121.8 decibels). A 10 decibel increase in sound means that a 127 decibel noise is twice as loud as a 117 decibel sound. Local fans have been blowing these tuneless horns mercilessly since the tournament began and it has caused no end of irritation to viewers and fans, well at least the ones I’ve spoken to at pubs and with friends.

There have been petitions to FIFA from authorities but the president of the organisation, Sepp Blatter, refused to ban the World Cup horn on account of its traditional ties to South Africa. However, players similarly are not amused and have complained that the racket completely puts them off their game. One solution would be for World Cup broadcasters to simply transmit the audio from their commentators only and omit crowd noise all together, but that could take away from the subtleties of what we hear between the minuscule spurts of silence between horn blasts, right? Well, maybe I shouldn’t complain, I live in a world that allows me to enjoy the fruits of a peaceful, global party and the game football, that’s pretty exciting. I just wish I didn’t have to feel like an entomologist collecting worker-drone data at a hive every time I tuned in to the Netherlands tuning they’re opponent.