when crowds do chants, why does it always sound like they’re slightly behind the beat?
In: 6
I have no evidence to back this but I’d put money on it being because so very few people want to be the chant starter (the first to speak), so most wait even a small moment before making a sound. It’s like a cumulative slow effect
Most likely it’s an illusion caused by the speed of sound.
It takes time for the sound to reach a person and their singing to travel back.
So in a large stadium the back of the crowd will be more out of sync with the front.
It’s because they are slightly behind the beat. Sound travels about 300 meters per second.
The music venue can easily be dozens of meters in size. So the sound has to travel from the scene to the audience and then back again, taking a few tenths of a second in time. People in the audience might feel like they are in the beat, but if the concert is being recorded at the scene, it sounds like they are lagging behind.
Sound takes time to travel from point a to b.
Say you are standing in the endzone of a football field (100 yards) with perfect acoustics and a sound reflector in the other end zone.
You clap your hands. ~0.267 second later the sound of the clap reaches the reflector. ~0.267 seconds after that (or about 0.533 seconds total) you hear the echo of your clap.
No imaging there is a person standing every 10 yards. The guy 10 yard from you hears your clap ~0.027 seconds after your clap. 20 yards equal ~0.53. 30 = ~0.080.
So each person tries to match your claps based on when they hear it, but they do not hear it all at the same time.
The result from your standpoint is a cascade of claps, each a little later than the other.
even not accounting for the speed of sound, most crowds do not have a great sense of rhythm and will often go completely off beat
to piggy back on what everyone else has said, here is a video of an art project call “Sonic runway” it’s is a visualizer that shows the [speed of sound](https://youtu.be/Pw9HVdpnFj8?t=24)
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