The plastic vuvuzela noisemaker, scourge of the human ear and omnipresent World Cup companion, may be bad for our hearing—but it has been terrific for our brains.

Around the world, human ingenuity has been harnessed in pursuit of a single goal: removing the vuvuzela's drone from World Cup football broadcasts through noise-canceling devices, EQ settings, and Linux.

"Be Zen about it"



The trumpets can be deafening, and now come with helpful textured graphics suggesting that vuvuzelas not be blown directly at another person's ear. Long a part of South African football tradition, the horns have now spawned an anti-vuvuzela backlash so strong that FIFA president Sepp Blatter took to Twitter to quiet the restive masses.

"To answer all your messages re: the Vuvuzelas," he wrote yesterday, "I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound."

A few minutes later, he expanded on this thought. "I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?"

The constant background drone of the horns may not deafen TV viewers thousands of miles away, but it has outraged plenty of them. The BBC, hit with several hundred complaints, is already considering the broadcast of a "vuvuzela free" version of the World Cup matches, but geeks who aren't willing to wait can filter the noise today.

The easiest method costs €2.95. Vuvuzela haters can visit antivuvuzelafilter.com, plunk down their cash, and download a 45-minute MP3 file. This must be played back during each half of a football match, preferably from a speaker right next to the television, and the "specially designed Vuvuzela noise-cancellation sound is a wave with the same amplitude but with inverted phase to the original sound." In other words, you get active noise cancellation.

This sounds unbelievably dodgy to us. Active noise cancellation relies on sampling ambient sound and reproducing that sound exactly out of phase with the original; the result is that the sound waves cancel each other out. This system, relying as it does on prerecorded vuvuzelas, would seem unlikely to have much effect.

Still, the UK's Telegraph newspaper tracked down a local professor of acoustics to weigh in on the idea. Trevor Cox from the University of Salford couldn't see any way that the system would line up the sound waves correctly. His advice was lower tech: "Be Zen about it; accept vuvuzelas as part of the World Cup soundscape and pour another beer."

Popular Science dug up a more difficult solution from the German blog Die Surfpoeten. Here, an "anti-vuvuzela filter" is created by filtering out the horn's most common frequencies. The filters are set up in a program like Logic Express, and all audio is first routed through a computer for realtime processing before heading out or a receiver or speakers.

If you don't want to drop any cash on your filter and you run Linux, OStatic profiles a technique using the JACK audio connection kit to set up similar filters.

"It’s not perfect but seems to work okay," says the author.

Of course, any reasonably detailed EQ hardware or software could do the same job; Surfpoeten claims that the main vuvuzela frequencies to filter are 233, 466, 932, and 1864Hz (this gets the main tone and several overtones).

Don't want to go to all this trouble? Just turn down the TV's sound. But get ready for the vuvuzela drone to infiltrate European football matches, too. As the Guardian notes, vuvuzela sales in the UK are brisk. "Sainsbury's sold 22,000 red vuvuzelas—or 'Vu Vu horns' as it brands them—in 12 hours before England's game—one every two seconds. The supermarket chain has ordered 25,000 extra horns but thinks it may run out before Friday's game against Algeria."

The paper also quotes one Mike Brown, who was buying a pair for his kids. "I could be making a terrible mistake but I think I'm going to have to make a rule that they can only blow them during the actual games. But the kids wanted them and I can't resist it when they get excited about something like the World Cup."

Mike, as the parent of small children myself, let me concur with your first instinct: yes, you are making a horrible mistake. Right now you may have World Cup Fever, but in six months you might well come down with Vu Vu Tinnitus.