Imagine the usual cheering when the home team goes forward, and jet engine roaring when the opponent attacks. One football team sees incredible loudness as a way to win the game.
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Penn State's Beaver Stadium is one of the loudest in college football in the USA. When its crowd roars at a visiting quarterback, his calls can only be heard from a 1,5 meter away. Next season, the university's athletic department will put into play a new strategy to make its field even louder thanks to a team of acoustic scientists. The goal is to send a deafening wall of sound at the opposing team's offensive line.
Guido D'Elia, director for communications and branding for Penn State football working with Penn State graduate student Andrew Barnard recorded crowd noise during three home games. Using 11 sound meters strategically placed around the field, he compared volume levels when each team had the ball.
When the Penn State's Nittany Lions were on the offense the noise levels inside 107,282-seat Beaver Stadium reached 75 decibels on the field. That's about as loud as a car radio playing at a reasonable volume. But the noise skyrocketed to 110 decibels - 50 times as loud! - when visiting teams were on offense. For the visiting quarterback that is like trying to have a conversation while standing next to a giant speaker at a rock concert.
As an added advantage, the Nittany Lions play Barnard's recordings during practice to prepare for the noise they will face at other stadiums. They are confident that they will not hear anything worse on the road than what their own fans can produce. When the stadium was empty, Barnard searched for the best spots for an audible assault by carrying a noisy speaker around to 45 different seats and measuring how loud it sounded on the field. A computer model crunched this data to fill in the rest of the stadium.
Stadiums with a steeper slope are generally thought to hold sound in better than Penn State's stadium. But according to data, Penn State's upper deck, which juts out toward the field at the end zones, may act like a megaphone that catches and amplifies the sound in the higher seats of the lower levels.
To take advantage of this acoustic effect, Penn State plans to move the 20,000 seats in its student section squarely into the southern end zone when the entire stadium is reseated for the 2011 season. Barnard's computer model predicts that this relocation will quiet the east side of field slightly but increase the sound on the west side by almost 50 percent. And the for guests' quarterback it will be very bad situation: two meters away nobody will hear him. Everything for the victory. ■
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