If the sound of vuvuzelas is ruining your enjoyment of the TV broadcasts of matches from South Africa, do not despair. Zagreb physicist Dr. Mario Stipčević from the Ruđer Bošković Institute has devised a way to neutralize vuvuzelas without creating an uncomfortable silence, reports the portal jutarnji.hr
– Already at the first match, I noticed a constant sound that lasted from the first to the last second of the match with almost no variation in pitch and volume. Of course, this sound began to irritate me, but I thought it was caused by technical problems during the broadcast – said Dr. Stipčević, who then learned from the newspapers that the irritating sound is produced by the vuvuzela trumpet, which comes in several sizes. – This shocked me because I do not understand how it is possible that all vuvuzelas produce one tone of the same pitch and that spectators blow into them with the same strength throughout the match, regardless of what is happening on the field. However, the very fact that all vuvuzelas produce a tone of the same pitch allows for its simple removal through tonal filters that eliminate a small part of the spectrum – said Stipčević, whose measurements showed that the frequency of the fundamental tone of vuvuzelas is around 460 Hz. (www.jutarnji.hr)
