Yamaha’s “Remote Cheerer” brings fan applause back to empty stadiums

Yamaha staged a field test for its Remote Cheerer at Japan's Shizuoka Stadium ECOPA on May 13.

This week, Yamaha announced a plan to put fans back in the stadiums for major sporting events this summer-virtually, at least.

The company's new smartphone application, Remote Cheerer, is designed to allow sports fans to cheer from home in a way their teams can hear in the stadium. The app itself looks and functions much like a typical soundboard app you might use to summon up a Homer Simpson D'oh!-but instead of just making a noise on your phone, it integrates the cheers of potentially tens of thousands of fans and plays them on loudspeakers at the stadium where their teams are playing.

When fully integrated at the stadium itself, the application does a better job of emulating normal crowd noise than the short description suggests. For Yamaha's field test at Shizuoka Stadium, there were amplified loudspeakers placed in each seating section of the stadium, and fans' cheers were localized to the section where they would sit, had they been able to attend the football match personally. The result is a much more diffuse and authentic-sounding crowd noise.

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