The plastic horn that drowned out a whole World Cup
A cheap plastic horn about 65 centimetres long, blowing a single note near the B-flat below middle C, became the soundtrack of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Broadcasters struggled to hear commentators, pharmacies ran out of earplugs, and a 35-metre giant built in Cape Town was never allowed to sound.
The vuvuzela had long filled South African football stadiums before the rest of the world noticed it at the 2009 Confederations Cup. Who invented it is disputed. A Kaizer Chiefs fan, Freddie Maake, says he fashioned an aluminium version from a bicycle horn in 1965 and has photos to show it, a plastics factory popularised the moulded version in 2002, and a Baptist church claimed it as its own. Similar horns are older still: one appears in Winslow Homer's 1870 painting The Dinner Horn.
FIFA considered a ban, worried the horns could become weapons for hooligans, and the Spanish midfielder Xabi Alonso asked for them to go. South African officials replied that the noise was part of their football, and Sepp Blatter agreed, warning against trying to Europeanise an African World Cup. The horns stayed. Hyundai's enormous blue version on a Cape Town freeway bridge stayed silent, though, because city authorities feared its volume.
The sound itself posed a technical puzzle. Television and radio audiences often heard little else, so engineers proposed notch filtering to strip out the horn's note at about 235 Hz and its first partial at 465 Hz. Simple filters muddied commentary, prompting adaptive versions that some cable providers adopted. Players complained the din broke concentration and disturbed rest.
Researchers measured it too. At one metre a vuvuzela can reach 120 dB(A), the threshold of pain, and a University of Pretoria team recorded an average 113 dB(A) at two metres. A London study in 2010 found it spreads fine droplets able to carry cold and flu germs more widely than coughing. Bans followed from UEFA competitions, Wembley and the 2012 Olympics. Yet the horn has had a stranger afterlife, from protests at BP's London office to a baroque-style double concerto premiered in Helsinki.
Source: Vuvuzela
