crowds, the lack of

been thinking about crowds for a long time – but was spurred on last night when i found this millwall chant:

football crowds have always been real interesting to me. unlike the audience of a concert or a play, the crowd are very much integral to the spectacle itself, and the sound of the crowd is, essentially, the sound track of the event. it is a participatory experience, with fans reacting in real time to the events on the pitch, as well as the events off of it, with an ever rotating and developing roster of chants and songs. i also like the idea of untrained mass singing, focusing just on the atmosphere and the overwhelming feel of the sound, rather than technical ability, which impresses in a very different, and much more immediate way.

 

this chant, whose history i am not qualified to assess, arose as a reaction to the media’s, and subsequently the public’s, perception of millwall as a club made exclusively of hooligan fans. something about the acceptance, incorporation and repurposing of this dire reputation by an audibly voluminous crowd is strangely powerful and decidedly unsettling. thousands of voices, fierce and deliberately antagonistic, summoned by the click of a button, and silenced again. where are these voices now?

 

since professional football has returned, teams have largely played to empty, eerily silent stadiums. a friend of mine (who knows a lot more about this world than i do) explained that clubs were starting to pump in sound through speakers arranged in the stands. it looks as if each club, and those in charge of their respective stadiums, have the ability to decide whether they want to install speaker systems or leave the pitch to the sounds of the players and managers. for the teams that have decided on having crowd noises implemented, where is this sound coming from? whose voices are substituting the thousands of missing bodies? who is in control of what they say? what they sing? and where do controversial chants such as millwall’s fit into this?

 

in an article from july (i am unsure as to how things have progressed since then) stadium managers at QPR explained how a company called Autograph developed a complex surround sound system to be installed in the stands. three engineers control individual sections of the stands, which react accordingly to events on the pitch (e.g. if an away defender is outpaced by the home teams right winger, the ghost fans at the right stand by the away goal will be heard cheering enthusiastically) and sing club chants. this bizarre video from the clubs twitter shows the setup in action:

when i say ‘bizarre’ i mean purely in effect: an empty stadium full of cheering fans. QPR’s efforts are certainly admirable, and sound a lot better than the less advanced alternatives of other clubs, or the Premier Leagues initial decision to simply add crowd noises in post- when the game is broadcast. however, seeing one man, reflected in the screen of his iPad, control an entire stadium of fans with the touch of a finger is certainly a strange and unsettling experience. interestingly, at the time when the article was written, QPR had lost all three of their home games with the surround sound system installed. i do wonder what the effect of an incredibly noisy, incredibly reactive, incredibly alive empty dead stadium is on the players’ mentality. do they feel the backing of a legion of supporters? or are their disembodied voices a mocking replica of the former adrenaline and glory?

 

to end on (for now), this line of thought reminded me of this horrific video of the audience of the Kelly Clarkson Show dancing to Vin Diesel’s new EDM song (from Stereogum):

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‘Kelly Clarkson Show’ Virtual Audience Vibes To Vin Diesel’s EDM Song, 2020

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this is disturbing, no doubt about it. but in a world where collective physical presence is no longer possible, what options do we have?

 

(not that. definitely not that. hopefully more on this to come)

 

edit 1: just found this video via a GQ article showing what happens when the audio engineers accidentally hit the wrong button in anticipation. watch from 15 seconds in:

edit 2: turns out the dystopia encroached upon in that Kelly Clarkson clip existed in South Korean baseball pre-pandemic, as early as 2014:

“Do not expect applause.” – W.S. Graham. Why not?

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