Apparently everyone at the world cup is blowing these plastic horns called vuvuzelas and they’re making everything sound like b-flat.
If it is a constant note then surely erecting a massive speaker broadcasting the same note in reversed amplitude will counteract it and make it virtually disappear. Same prinicipal as in cockpits and noise cancelling equipment. But then all it will take is the next generation of vuvuzela, a few hundred Hz off frequency for this expensive equipment to be rendered useless… even worse this will then be heard to make a loud noise of its own with nothing to cancel it out.
Mark Dowle, Abingdon, UK
It seems so obvious but, like so many apparently brilliant ideas, it turns out to cause more problems than it solves. The “Massive Amplitude-Reversed Drone Speaker” (MARDS) was actually built just after the war, by scientists who hoped it could cancel out the sound of fascism. These boffins tuned it to an annoying frequency, and then left it droning on and on about how brilliant it is. Sadly, after a terrible calibration error, MARDS thinks it invented television, teenagers, custard, “being over 30″, tennis, “being over 40″, the printing press, talking loudly, ignoring people, “being over 50″, “being over 60″, droning, and sesame seeds. We know it now as Janet Street-Porter and nobody can work out how to turn the fucking thing off.
85 Responses to “Surely”
That’s the worst idea about anything that anyone has ever said anywhere.
I think Mark saw this idea on How2 once and was desperate to get it into a post.
I find it slightly endearing that Mark has written both his solution to the ‘problem’ AND the reason it wouldn’t work within the same post.
It’s as if the delete function never existed.
Speaking as an SAS-trained shitty bedroom sound engineer – that’s not how sound works. Or rather it is, but Mark fails to understand it entirely.
Mark is… an unsound unicorn’s uterus!!
Perhaps send a squad of SAS-trained stewards armed with bags of corks?
Still, this vuvuzela phenomenon is just the free market at work: fans want to make noises, vendors provide the means to meet that need. If you want less annoying noises, sell better instruments more cheaply to the fans. I’d like to see a string section, myself.
Oh, and: am I the only person who thought “vuvuzela” was the name of a ladypart?
I like the idea that people are acting all surprised when the people who attend a football tournament turn out to be a noisy and boisterous rabble. I mean, who would have thought it possible? But then, the bores have to drone on about something. There hasn’t been any rioting or anything so they have to round on the supporters for much more minor perceived infractions.
Mind you, they must be a pretty technologically advanced rabble if their cheap, mass produced, silly hooty novelty items are capable of combining to produce a coherent sine wave of a single fixed frequency amenable to cancellation. It would be like a bunch of clubbers waving glowsticks spontaneously forming a laser.
Rather less technically advanced is Mark Dowle who clearly knows little of phase or acoustics in general. As the more technically adept will already know, the most effective way to eliminate annoying hooting noises when watching football is to use the mute button. Commentators and pundits alike are instantly silenced.
As t’otherone pointed out, there’s something so stunningly honest about someone who thinks up a shit solution, realises it’s shit and still shares both shit hypothesis and shit conclusion with the Internet…
Although it does make him look as intelligent as dog excrement.
I thought it was a badly spelled and grammatically impossible French phrase, i.e. vous vous est là?
@sheepless
Mark Dowie is a vicuña’s varicose vuvuleza: works for me.
I just had a great idea to solve world hunger.
If people are constantly hungry, then just make an equal amount of people constantly full up, the hungry people will virtually disappear. But then all it will take is a couple of the hungry people to die or eat something and the whole thing will be thrown out of balance, worse we’ll have loads of fat people hanging around.
A more practical and long-term solution to this problem and several others: seat the spectators in a vacuum.
I think you’re taking a bit of license with the word “realises” there. His reasoning was completely shit. The problem with his original idea was not that it would only work in the key of b-flat but that it wouldn’t work at all, ever. Because it was complete shit. The fact that he got one thing right (that his original idea was shit) was pure luck and merely the byproduct of another completely shit idea he had.
So yeah, I don’t think “realise” covers it. We need a new word for when someone gets something right completely by accident. Like when Thatcher started going senile and pissing down her own leg.
There’s something about this kind of commenter which isn’t covered by either “Permanently Bewildered” or “Shit Sherlocks”. I’d like to see a new category, perhaps a sort of Armchair Einstein?
This would cover commenters who have enough technical knowledge of a subject to propose a clever solution, without having enough to realise that it’s retarded. These folks are subtly different from the majority of HYSers who form their clever solutions with absolutely no technical knowledge of anything.
I played a gig at a pub at the weekend and we had to wait until the end of the football to start playing. I too discovered that the one note tune they were playing was in the key of Bb. It was a bit like a formula one race taking place in a beehive.
The out of phase speaker will not work. If it did two people playing these horns next to each other would also make no noise.
The note could be notched out with a decent graphic equaliser for TV but this wouldn’t work in the real world.
Sorry. I have my serious live sound engineer’s head on at the moment. I will put the usual one back on in a minute.
Don’t call me Shirley.
Typewriting Monkey. As in, if you have an infinite amount of typewriters and an infinite amount of monkeys, sooner or later they’ll produce the complete works of Cuger Brant.
Ideally occurring during the proposed Sarah Palin visit.
Three monkeys, two weeks, tops.
Oh Christ, I’ve been here two hours and can’t stop laughing. Bastards, I’ve got no work done today at all. I’m never going to leave.
I think you’d need to give at least two of those monkeys a lobotomy. Otherwise the output will be closer to Shakespeare.
Mark is dumb and due for ridicle but I still can’t hate him.
This cunt on the Mail website, however, I would like to forcibly inject with concentrated gibbon jism laced with dolphin fanny batter.
It’s regarding a 47 year old woman teacher jailed for sexually grooming a 15 year old boy….
Amen to that, t’otherone. What a twat of the highest order.
How does one sexually groom a person? Is there a sort of pubic comb involved? I need to know in case it ever happens to me.
I would like to see a whole stadium playing football themed banjos.
I don’t want to hear it though.
@ Man-Bitch
I’m assuming linseed oil and chamois leather is involved at some point.
if only someone would invent a speaker that can play more than one note we’d be in business..
I love the vulvazela – so much more entertaining than watching twenty-two millionaires ruining a lawn (© Charlie Brooker). Apparently most vulvazelas are actually in the key of F major, although of course it goes without saying that the fourth degree of F is Bb (drones on for several more hours).
@Oaf – Last night on the wireless I heard a mock-up of what the background sound would be like if the vulvazelas were replaced by ukeleleleleles. Fab, it were.
A proper scientist* has something to say on filtering the noise. Quite a lot to say actually
*Erm someone who thinks he is anyway
Another Typewriting Monkey has appeared on the HYS thread re ‘Protecting Upland Communities’:
Indeed, what is the point Mike?
MY vuvuzela is shaped like a kudu horn and doesn’t produce an irritating noise, mainly because I can’t quite get the lip vibrato required to make more than a low spluttery farting, which I can do perfectly well on my own thank you. Scares the bejeezus out of the cat though, so it’s good enough for me.
Yes, I find that keeping the cat away from one’s vuvuzela is a skill of inestimable value.
Cyclic Redundancy Checks are for wimps.
Surely if FIFA gave referees vuvuzelas instead of whistles, then they could justify a ban without seeming to discriminate against african fans. But then again, some passing bees or a Goodyear blimp might be mistaken by the players for the full-time signal and they’ll all go back to their hotels prematurely.
So one to keep on hold until the bees are extinct and we discover the anti-graviton.
@Clovis
Why are you trying to vibrate your cat’s vuvuzela? The approved method for alarming a cat is a poke in the pimhole with the rubber end of a pencil.
HYS on whether the bloody “Bloody Sunday” report was worth it.
Well, I’ll certainly lay off the paste, if it’s such a problem to you.
I fear that Mrs Slocombe might be putting in an appearance before too long..
And this from Queen_Becci_B on the “Are the Israelis a bunch of fucking cunts?” thread:
Now that’s what I call a government that really gets under your skin!
ITV fucked something up or something, Killearn of Southend felt inspired to do this. Don’t read it, it made me feel all funny inside:
There is a rich source of cunty Bloody Sunday comments on the Daily Mail and HYS sites
@ Dr Snuggles – it’s not deliberate; it’s just that the cat runs away when I get out a pencil now, so the vuvuzela is just keeping me ticking over in the cat-pissing-off stakes – something which is increasingly using up a lot of time. Yes, yes, I do work from home, how did you guess?
How DARE these people think they can get away with continuing their own way of cheering at their own football games in their own country when there are Anglo Saxon ENGLISH people watching on television?
Of course, we can’t ban the vuvuzelas as the political correct brigade would moan that it’s against their ‘oooman rites,’ which is quite clearly political correctness gone mad.
On the other hand, I’ve heard that they want to ban English culture in pubs.
How dare these people think that they can stop us from continuing our own way of cheering on our own football games in our own pubs in our own country?
Of course, they want to ban them because the political correct brigade are too concerned with the ‘oooman rites’ of Muslims, which is quite clearly political correctness gone mad.
Aside from the financial issues that clearly arise hiring a lawyer for twelve years. Bloody Sunday HYS is mostly a circle jerk. A few gems though.
Aside from the observation on the financial implications of 12-year lawyer bill, you gotta love the subtext. “If the British Army cannot perform a shambolic fuck up of an operation which ends in a chaotic mess of indiscriminate fire leading to decades of resentment, how the fuck can we take back the Suez?!?”
@BifidusDigestivum
Regarding that bell-end from southend, why does he go to all the effort to make a poem about how shite ITV is, but only rhyme sometimes? Suspense, mime and clear are bunged in there, and his use of the iambic pentameter is poor.
Regarding the main twat, I also enjoy the fact that he has seen fit to design hi-tech spiffing audio technology that only produces one note. And also the notion of the ‘next generation’ of stupid horns. They’re evolving!
Your mum is.
This has got to be one of SYB’s all time greats – monumentally twattish on so many levels. Not just that he’s heard of phase cancellation and is happy to display his ignorance in public; not that he fails to take into account the fact it could only work if all the vulvathingys were in phase, and even then only in one place; and not the fact that he assumes an adaptive noise cancelling system is beyond the limits of technology – despite citing an example of such a system himself, in the very same post…
No. The best bit is when he even manages to get the bit that rubbishes his own idea wrong, when he could’ve simply used the fact that it’s completely fucking impossible.
Fractally twattish.
@ Bugrat
I am sure we would but the sound of her spinning in her grave is exactly in the key of Bb and has, according to the episode of Brainiac on the brown note that Mark Dowle watched, been cancelled out by those rum coves from Bongo Bongo Land.
@R.L’s.F.B.
An HYS poster from Southend,
Was really a bit of a bell-end.
His poems would rhyme,
And then sometimes not
And his prosody was beyond the wit of man to mend.
Maybe it’s just me, but parading in a dress is a punishment how?
“Same prinicipal as in cockpits and noise cancelling equipment”
Yeah like cockpits and noise cancelling equipment would share a principal.
They have OFSTED at the same time, if I’m right.
Bill Baur:
If they can bring their culturally relevant vuvuzelas, then you have to allow the Swiss to bring Alphorns, the Scots bagpipes, the Italians violins, the French harpsichords, etc. I am American, so you must let us hook up a Fender Strat to a Marsall Amp, as that is part of my culture. When will the nuttiness stop?
Logical thinking. Don’t take it for granted.
BLOCKQUOTE FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIL.
The “Logical thinking” comment is mine. All else is Bill Baur.
And finally, Bill (different Bill) on the HYS debate asking us all what Obama can do about the BP oil-poop:
Well, Bill, you’re right about one thing: you a nut.
Whoopee cushions would be have been a far funnier option than vuvuzelas.
It’s easy. All you need is one phase cancelling speaker per vuvuzela. This can be included in the price of a ticket and could be attached by an official at the entrance gate.
Alternatively they could just be smashed to pieces with a big hammer as a condition of entry.
Since it’s the monotonous buzz of the vuvuzelas that is most annoying, free entry for people with big horns would fix it.
While this killjoy sees only logistical problems, I think all right thinking people would see this as a massive improvement. It would make football much more entertaining for those of us who are too intelligent to have people kicking a ball around hold their attention for a whole 90 minutes.
Anyway, why does our American friend associate the harpsichord with France? Surely he means the accordion? You’ve got to get your national stereotypes right if you want to be taken seriously as an imperial power.
I am not sure that the Italians should get first dibs on the violins either. England will be needing the entire world supply of those to make pathetic Hearts And Flowers type music when the inevitable happens.
Unfortunately, I can’t. Looks like I’m stuck with it.
Thank you, I laughed out loud at that.
Because killearn of Southend is male and rabidly transphobic, and thinks that everybody in the chain from camera operator to his parents’ hi-res screen is the same.
Sounds like you’re already doing a better job than me and my bicycle. Buy a few more Prius’ and you can take a significant chunk out of the nation’s oil dependency.
Well, my home would require at least three Prius’ and a wood-pellet stove to heat it. I think he’s getting a bargain.
On a Daily Mail story about some statue weeping ketchup or something…
Excellent.
Haaaaa…. I’m about to go off on one… please, someone shoot me in the head or something… BELIEVE WHAT YOU F***ING LIKE, Chantel, JUST DON’T RAM IT DOWN MY THROAT AND I’LL RETURN THE COMPLIMENT!
Haaaah… okay, I feel a bit better now. Really. It was just a temporary thing, honest.
@ Mary
Oh G*D don’t let that be Poe! The image is just so outstanding, I want it to be true so much… In fact I have a ‘broose’ on my forehead myself (in the shape of a bonkers woman entangled in her car seat beat) from slamming my head against the desk.
I didn’t see G*D though, baerd or no baerd.
@ t’otherone
I thought it must be fake, but then I thought it was a bit too elaborate for a hoax – most wouldn’t think of writing G*D or write ‘in His Grace’ with the appropriate capitals.
I hope beyond hope that it’s a real life nutter.
There are two types of men; transvestites and transvestites in denial
(Not one of mine, but I so wish it was)
Using the same principle, the continuous annoying buzz of right-wing drivel from HYS fucktards could be cancelled out by a website where over-educated and under-employed people could mercilessly take the piss in an occasionally amusing way, possibly with multiple references to animal genitalia. It could have a title that plays on the phrase ‘Have Your Say’.
Just a thought.
More Chantel:
2,000-calorie milkshake equivalent to 68 rashers of bacon dubbed worst drink in U.S.
Sony unveils super-thin OLED screen that can be rolled around a pencil
Poe.
@ Dean
You’ve ruined my morning.
It’s nicely done though… “why is that girl called emily she is from Paris”… inspired!
@Mal
Sounds fucking awful.
@Mary
Oh dear G*D I hope that’s true. Even the Daily Mail readers are ripping into the nutter. It’s produced some wonderful posts, none near the quality of Chantel mind.
I think Dave B is absolutely wrong right.
I’ve thought about it Rosemary, and the only thing that comes to mind is that you’re a twat with a somewhat limited grasp of science
@Kris
Yeah, it was a stupid idea.
If only there were an acronym for that.
Wow. This Chantal/Poe person is a gift. Does she(he?) have some sort of preposition filter or something? What would she make of a headline like, “Obama criticises British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico”?
P.S. This is an invented example. You couldn’t make it up…
As a fundamentalist atheist I’ll happily explain: you are a fucking thick cunt.
Hang on a minute, maybe Chantel is Brian Harvey’s nom de plume?
Re: Previous post.
What the fuck happened there?
Ah. Forgot to put a slash in front of the terminating blockquote.
For a particular type of cylindrical wall-eye vision, a screen on a pencil really helps, actually.
@Lurker in a Burkha
What, the East 17 chap?
I am trying to stem the tide of my rising misanthropy, and this thread is not helping…
Rotwatcher says: “Apparently most vulvazelas are actually in the key of F major, although of course it goes without saying that the fourth degree of F is Bb (drones on for several more hours).”
Absolute cock. Most of them are about 60cm which is about the right length for a (crappy) Bb. The “fourth” thing is cock too. As you would expect it plays the (crappy) fundamental, then a (crappy) octave, then a (crappy) fifth, then the next (crappy) octave, then your lips bleed and you soil yourself and your relatives try to put you in a home and get your PIN off you for the savings account. So up to that point, and indeed up to those incontinence pants, you have played a Bb Bb F Bb (but as horrible as &*^% and out of tune to boot) and then god knows what would happen – in theory D F Ab Bb and in practice the top of your head would actually come right off, spraying faeces all over your grasping family and their tales of “it’s so nice in there Grandpa you can play Scrabble all day” yeah right the bastards.
Rotwatcher don’t EVER pronounce on brass playing matters ever again. The Ghurka Trombonists know where you live. Nuff said.
Still, just goes to show, eh?
For all those who don’t have TVs & radios: http://www.vuvuzela-time.co.uk/www.ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/*
*if in an open-plan office, best use headphones
!http://biseor.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/windowslivewritermmm_brains-d623creepy-11.jpg!