World Cup swarm of bees.

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Those damn vuvuzelas are so annoying! How can anyone play with those things sounding off? Whoever decided to sell those stupid horns in the stadium should be shot.

What is it with screamers? I quit going to amusments parks as young as eight because the stupid people would scream on every ride and make me have a meltdown.

Apparently if even one person throws one of those horns onto the pitch, the horns will be banned from all stadiums. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that somebody does that.

It's a horrible noise, and how lazy do people have to be that they can't even be bothered to cheer anymore, they need something else to make noise for them?

Ok, so I haven't been following the world cup (I generally avoid TV in the first place) and I'm sitting in the airport being forced to listen to it right now. At first I was just wondering why the hell a soccer game was being aired from the inside of a bee hive and put in my noise-cancelling earbuds, but I can still hear those damn horns (now that I googled it to figure out what the heck I was hearing).

Apparently NTs are also being bothered by the noise because they say its loud enough in the stands that it poses a risk for damaging people's hearing. There are some sites though that show how to filter the noise out if you're watching through a sound system or the computer where you can control audio specifics.

The sound-making element is a small metal reed that would be very quiet on its own. The horn provides excellent matching between the reed and the ambient air, not amplifying the sound, but ensuring that it forms a coherent (and therefore louder) wave front.

It is the same principle as a little thorn riding in the groove of a 78 rpm shellac gramophone record disk - the big horn provides matching between a vibrating brass plate holding the thorn and the ambient air. A few hundred milliwatts of gramophone is as loud as a few tens of watts of modern stereo loudspeaker.

For a interesting experiment, put an MP3 player earphone into the Vuvuzela instead of the reed, fully sealing the gap around it, or get two Vuvuzela horns for full-volume stereo out of the MP3 player.

I doubt that it would save much energy for countries on grid, but it would make a huge difference to communities who rely on expensive imported batteries for radios and so on if they did not have to use something so inefficiently matched as the loudspeaker.