Vuvuzela 101

If you're getting swept up in World Cup fever, no doubt you've dealt with the noise of the vuvuzelas - either in a white noise or distracting fashion.

The vuvuzela is like a medieval trumpet (the kind they hung banners off), and is played by blowing a raspberry into the mouthpiece. For acoustic nerds, the fluttering of the player's lips approximately 235 times a second resonate through the conical bore. It is said that a single vuvuzela played by a decent trumpeter is reminiscent of a hunting horn, but more commonly sounds like an elephant trumpeting, due in part to inconsistent airflow and motion of the lips. Of course, when there's hundred of them sounding off at the same time, it's more akin to a swarm of insects.

But how the hell do they get to be so loud? Well, most of that comes form the bore shape - conical, with flares. The main tone is at 235 hertz, and has harmonics at 470, 700, 940, 1171, 1400 and 1630 hertz (another treat for you sound geeks). By design, a flared instrument has louder higher-frequency harmonics than a cylindrical one, and is perceived as louder because the higher harmonics are at frequencies where our hearing is most sensitive. This is partly why the conical saxophone sounds louder than the cylindrical clarinet. And also why Wikipedia exists - to look that stuff up rather than actually know it.

The vuvuzela gets up to about 116 decibels and on television, it may seem louder. As noted above, there are key frequencies to squash if you don't naturally tune it out (I do), and there's an extensive number of ways how to here.