It’s a widely held truth that a loudly-cheering American football crowd can help its team out on defense by drowning out the signal-calling of the opposing team’s quarterback, but what about the impact of crowd noise on a game like hockey, where fans make noise to encourage a team’s offense?
According to new research from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, crowd noise at a hockey game don’t disrupt communication significantly, and they’re not connected with “game events” on the ice, either.
Don’t waste your voice
The study doesn’t necessarily discount the effect of home-ice advantage, but it does suggest that cheering loudly won’t increase the chances your team will score at that moment.
Study author Brenna Boyd, an undergraduate research assistant, said her work was inspired by the ongoing battle among college football teams over who has the loudest stadium.
“I wasn’t into football — I was into hockey — so I wanted to know how loud our hockey stadium was, while also learning a little bit more about acoustics,” said Boyd, a researcher in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Durham School of Architectural Engineering & Construction. She added that the main thrust of her work was to find out if crowd noise could affect communications on the ice.
For the study, which is set to be presented at the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) meeting this week in Jacksonville, Florida, Boyd assessed the noise levels during four college hockey home games played by the University of Nebraska-Omaha team from November 2014 through March 2015. Boyd said her work was modeled after a similar 2011 study that assessed the noise levels during college football games. Because hockey stadiums have closed roofs, they have the potential to amplify crowd sound by virtue of their enclosed design.
Unsurprisingly, Boyd said, noise amounts in the student section were reliably louder than the others. When the noise amounts were matched up with game events, Boyd discovered that there wasn’t a strong relationship between decibel level and goals by the home team.
“The loudest game was December 12, and we won that one by one goal, so I think there wasn’t enough data to see whether loudness was correlated with how many goals they achieved during the game,” she said.
In post-game surveys of the UNO players, Boyd said she found a majority reporting crowd noise was not distracting, and that the noise didn’t keep players from communicating with their teammates or coach on the bench.
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Feature Image: Matt Hintsa/Flickr
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