Soccer chants neutralized with echos

From The New Scientist, an article about Dutch researchers who are developing an echo technique to neutralize racist soccer chants.

The echoes trip up efforts to synchronise a chant, neutralising an unwelcome message without drowning out the overall roar of a crowd.

Sander van Wijngaarden, who researches human acoustics at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research in Delft, began working on the technique in 2004 after several Dutch soccer matches were blighted by abusive chanting.

"We knew that people become confused if you feed their speech back with a delay," he told New Scientist. "So we wanted to try and apply it in a group context."

To chant in time a person must keep track of several different sound sources around them. "This can be very complex because there are large numbers of people involved," van Wijngaarden explains.

(via Boing Boing)