Although it was introduced in 1910 in the Shembe Church, South Africa, the rest of the world heard its blare 100 years later in 2010 from the World Cup Football hosted by the country. It’s the vuvuzela! An approximately 2 feet long plastic horn that makes a deafening sound of around 127 decibels. Decibel is a unit for measuring the intensity of sound. How loud is 127 decibels? Well, the sound of our normal conversation is about 60 decibels, so you can guess how loud is vuvuzela.
Vuvuzela became the main method for football fans to cheer up their teams in the 2010 world cup and it quickly spread all over the world. It also found other uses like protests. In 2011 protesters in Wisconsin, USA used vuvuzelas in demonstrations against the state governor. However, besides popularity, vuvuzela gained a lot of infamy and banning. Health experts and audiologists warned about the health risks including permanent hearing loss that may occur due to substantial exposure to vuvuzela. It was banned in Wimbledon, Sydney Cricket Ground, Yankee Stadium, the Champions League, etc. And of course, it was banned in the 2022 world cup football held in Qatar.
Nevertheless, the human instinct to make loud sounds to cheer or jeer cannot be banned. With every festival and celebration, we make high-volume sounds. We rejoice with dancing and singing at high volume chorus, we boom gun salutes for visiting heads of state or government or the death of some monarch. We burst firecrackers, bellow trumpets, beat drums, honk car horns, and so on, at weddings, religious festivals, victory celebrations, etc.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on February 28, 2023. Please read the full article here or here.