Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
The loudest clap ever recorded clocked in at 113
decibels. And the world record for fastest clapping was recently set at
802 claps per minute. Clapping
is the most common human body noise others
are meant to hear that doesn't involve the vocal cords.
It's a great built-in percussion instrument.
But clapping has also become a collective social gesture that we use in
groups to express admiration,
approval. Especially for things that happen
on stage.
So here I am on stage. But to show approval, to show that they like
things, why do humans clap? Amazing question!
When applauding, a person creates claps at a rate of about 2.5-5 claps per
second.
Kinetic energy from the hands is converted into acoustic energy,
mainly within the 2200 to 2800 hertz
range, the frequencies clap on, clap off devices
detect. But many other frequencies are created during a single
clap. And different hand positions create different spectra
of frequencies, most of which are not whole number multiples of each other,
which is why a clap
can't make a musical note. A discernible
definite pitch the way a clarinet or piano
or the human voice can.
If vocalisations can be so finely controlled,
why clap? I mean, it's such a crude,
messy noise. Well, at a fundamental
and physiological level the impulse to clap
may have originated as a reaction to an overflowing
of enthusiasm, an immediate and primitive reaction
to excitement. Steven Connor colourfully puts it this way:
"If the distinctive sound of the human is the sound of
language, then sound produced from other places than the mouth,
always has the taint of the gratuitous,
the excessive, or the proscribed.
Clapping is the benign superflux of the body, the diarrhoea
of sound." He calls it a spilling over
of feeling. A burst of energy unfiltered by language
or thought. It's a way to burn off extra enthusiasm,
but if clapping is so natural and involuntary to the
individual, how did it become coded into western
etiquette? An expected behavior you sometimes feel pressured to do,
even if you don't want to. Desmond Morris called
modern clapping patting a performer on the back
from a distance. And other theories have called clapping
high fiving yourself for something someone else
has done. But in its current form there is another thing
besides yourself and the performance that might be truly driving
applause. A super organism called
The Crowd. A study published in the Journal of the Royal Society found that
an individual's contribution to applause seems to have less to do with their
actual
opinion as to the quality of the performance and has more to do with
the behavior
of the collective group,
the anonymous. Group voice aspect of applause
also makes sense, when you consider the fact that clapping is a great
equalizer. Studies have shown that, as opposed to vocalizations, which can
betray a lot
about the people who make them, subjects cannot guess better than chance,
whether the clap they hear is from a man or a woman,
nor can they guess the size of the individual, based solely
on the sound of their clap. Clapping
may have become the standard nonverbal gesture of admiration, because it is
arguably the loudest, the easiest and the most democratic.
Performers can't here a thumbs-up or
a wink. Not everyone can snap their fingers
and clapping is less disruptive than stomping feet or
waving around big objects. Moreover,
historically, authorities have encouraged
clapping. In the sixth century BC,
Cleisthenes came to power in Ancient Greece as a democratic reformer
and made behaviors like clapping a civic
duty, the proper way for the masses to express
admiration for their leader. There wasn't enough time for
everyone to meet and greet his or her leader,
but they could all greet their leader together,
as one super organism
with one voice - applause. By the early 19th century
the desire to code appropriate group reactions and
encourage them by example was quite official.
Agencies offered claques for hire,
professional applauders, who would memorize operas,
attend them, like normal opera goers, and clap,
cry or laugh at appropriate times, so that the
actual audience would know when to properly
do what. It's interesting that five or
six months after being born human babies begin to realize that their hands
can work together. Clapping is a natural reaction to this realization
but parenting books have to advise parents to teach
their children to connect clapping with group
happiness and celebration. The connection itself
not being inevitable. To this day,
applause signs reinforce audience behavior, simply because those with the
authority are requesting it. Not because
it is a natural reaction but because it can be, and
historically has been, socially imposed.
So, what's the future
of applauds? Well, last week
I hung out with the guys from Grand Illusions,
really fascinating channel. And they pointed out something strange.
How many times have you listened to your favorite song?
Probably quite a few, right? You've listened to songs you
don't like plenty of times. But as recently
as a 150 year ago, people
only heard their favorite symphony
maybe two or three times in their entire
life. If you wanted music, you had to go to a concert
or pick up an instrument or sing. There was no other
way. But now, because of recorded music,
MP3 players and phones and tablets and personal computers and digital libraries
allow us to be an
audience of one.
An audience all by ourselves, not just when professionals get together
and draw a crown. In the 1990s,
Faith Popcorn gave this broader phenomenon a name:
cocooning. The Internet, home entertainment,
cell phones, alarm systems, self-checkout,
filters for our personal air and water
are all paraphernalia of cocooning.
A tendency toward more lonely, solitary experiences in the last
30 years. In my episode about the friend zone,
I talk about how cocooning might be making
friendship, meeting new people and new unexpected ideas
a veining experience.
But applause is safe, right? I mean, applause isn't about meeting new
people, it's about becoming them.
Becoming a super organism that speaks with one
unindividuated roar. And concerts and live performances are still
big parts of our lives. But what's fascinating
is that more entertainment is more available
than ever before. And despite being TV shows,
movies, games and music, this
new entertainment is increasingly consumed
like books. In solitude,
alone. You don't need to applaud alone
in a cocoon, but to be sure, alone on the Internet we don't applaud but we do
like and share and favorite and retweet.
Those actions might be a sort of ersatz
applause. In real life your clap is
lost in the crowd, aggregated into the total sound.
And online, so are your likes and favorites.
They join a collective gesture as a sort of
digital applause. A pessimist might feel like these new collective gestures are
hollow, lonely, a sad replacement for actual
social experiences. But what's really happening?
Because a like is not necessarily
lonely. A retweet by its very nature isn't a clap
lost in the crowd, it's a clap that joins the crowd,
but is also traceable directly back to you.
Maybe cocooning, maybe the rise of applause
substitutes, like digital applause, is something
to be worried about, or maybe it's the natural result of having so many
applause-worthy things just a few clicks away.
We can't applaud all of them, so we have evolved more scaleable
reactions, which, incidentally, are more personal,
instead of being pathetic clicks
from an increasingly isolated, cocooned population.
Digital applause might be like something else that comes from cocoons
and having more of them. Something beautiful.
Butterflies.
And as always,
thanks for watching.