PITTSBURGH _ As major professional sports ramp up their returns in the middle of a global pandemic, many will have one thing in common: Their stadiums and arenas will be devoid of fans.
And yet, when a English Premier League soccer player scores a goal or a Major League Baseball star hits a home run, it will at least sound as if the crowd is going wild due to artificial noise on broadcasts and, in some cases, pumped into stadiums. It's a whole new ballgame for auditory enjoyment of live sporting events _ for both fans and athletes.
"People's sense of immersiveness, the immediacy of their experience, is strongly influenced by sound," said Laurie Heller, a Carnegie Mellon University psychology professor specializing in auditory perception. " ... When it works right, you get completely immersed. Sound is as much of a part of that as vision."
There are scientific reasons why a bit of fanfare enhances live sporting events, whether in person or on television. As Heller noted, crowd noise draws fans' attention to big plays, increases excitement levels and serves as an auditory connection with every single person watching.
"In terms of the cognitive-emotional effects on the viewer, (crowd noise is) very real and underappreciated by people," she said.
For the most part, Heller is all for the concept of fake crowd noise to re-create those sensations as much as possible, but she is concerned about a potential "audiovisual disconnect" when there's a loud cheer on a broadcast but the camera potentially pans to rows of empty seats.
In addition, there's another academic concept at play here that most sports fans likely would've never thought of: arousal.
Irene Frieze, a professor emeritus of psychology at Pitt specializing in motivation and women's studies, explained that pheromones released by sports fans communicate their "aggressive arousal" at the event they're watching, which fuels their competitive fervor.
"When they have the games now, it's lacking all forms of stimulation," Frieze said. "It's lacking the sight of the people, it's lacking the noise that's going on. All of these things contribute to your arousal. They can't do much about the pheromones, but they can try to add those other two forms of stimulation."
