The company's new smartphone application, Remote Cheerer, is designed to allow sports fans to cheer from home in a way their teams can hear in the stadium. The app itself looks and functions much like a typical soundboard app you might use to summon up a Homer Simpson D'oh!—but instead of just making a noise on your phone, it integrates the cheers of potentially tens of thousands of fans and plays them on loudspeakers at the stadium where their teams are playing.
When fully integrated at the stadium itself, the application does a better job of emulating normal crowd noise than the short description suggests. For Yamaha's field test at Shizuoka Stadium, there were amplified loudspeakers placed in each seating section of the stadium, and fans' cheers were localized to the section where they would sit, had they been able to attend the football match personally. The result is a much more diffuse and authentic-sounding crowd noise. (...)
In addition to a preset selection of cheers and boos—which can be customized by the venue to be applicable to the teams that are playing—the app offers repeated-tap options for the crowd to engage in rhythmic clapping or chanting, which should reproduce the imperfect timing of real-life chants and stomps.
by Jim Salter, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Yamaha
