For example, why isn’t the maximum decibels simply equivalent to the loudest individual person in a group? Is it because everyone is individually being louder or does the amount of people factor in?
In: Biology
The way we perceive *loudness* is logarithmic. That is, if you have 10 speakers playing the same thing, it will only sound twice as loud as if you had only 1 speaker. A doubling in loudness is equal to 10dB.
Stadia hold tens of thousands of people, even up to a hundred thousand people, but that’s still only 5 orders of magnitude more than just a single person.
Therefore, even if 100,000 people in the stadium are yelling as loud as they can, that’s only 2^5, or 32 times louder than just a single person could yell, or about 50dB louder
This is not taking into consideration that sound is absorbed by the air as it passes through it, so people in the other side of the stadium will not sound as loud as the people right next to you.
It’s *also* not taking into account constructive and destructive interference. 100,000 people cannot produce the exact same sound wave, so there will be points in space where all of the sound waves add together slightly more and other points where they cancel out slightly more, but we’re just talking about the general case
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