Suppression of sports chants through delayed feedback of sound

A novel approach for disrupting offending chants at sporting events is proposed, based on attacking synchronization between individuals. Since timing is crucial for coordination between chanters, disruption of timing is expected to be effective against chants. Delayed auditory feedback is known to disrupt timing in individuals; hence, delayed feedback may also be effective in a group context. It is shown that the timing of individuals joining in with sports chants can be severely disrupted by also presenting an artificially delayed version of this chant. This effect is reduced if the individual is given more cues (direction, fidelity) to differentiate between original chant and distracter. Unsurprisingly, the effectiveness also depends on delay time and the target‐to‐distracter ratio. The feedback signal has to be at least as loud as the original chant, and the delay should be greater than 200 ms. Conventional auditory feedback shows a pronounced peak in effectiveness around 300 ms. Such a peak does not occur here; up to approximately 1 s, effectiveness increases monotonically with delay time. Field experiments show that it may be hard to implement the approach suggested here in practice, since the required feedback signal levels tend to lead to instability of the feedback loop.