Carrion Luggage

Clap

Got a short one today, from Nautilus.

    Hold Your Applause …  
…up to the microscope

The metaphorical microscope, anyway.

This spring, I had the pleasure of sitting in a crowded school gym in middle America and watching my eldest son cross a stage and shake a few hands to mark his successful completion of middle school.

I'm just going to say it: graduation ceremonies for anything but high school and college are a sure sign of a civilization in decline (as if we needed more proof). I'm not saying that because no one did it when I was a kid and we should stick to those ways because they were better (which is wrong), or out of jealousy (definitely not jealous). It's because after kindergarten, elementary, and middle school, further education is, at least for now, mandatory. High school might be the end of someone's formal education, and college probably is.

But, you know, some of those middle schoolers will get shot, or OD, or commit suicide in high school and never make it to graduation, so I suppose there's some rationale for it.

I digress. This article isn't about participation trophies, but the noises our hands can make.

The organizers of my son’s ceremony sought to head off the outbursts of clapping and hollering that are wont to emerge at these affairs.

Another reason not to have spurious graduation ceremonies: people simply cannot be trusted to act with restraint or consideration for others.

But then something strange happened. Once the first student’s name was called, a small group of people (their family, I presumed) clapped in unison. One coordinated, staccato clap. Playful acquiescence to the rules.

That's actually pretty cool.

But then, as more names were read aloud, the joke reverberated. In short order, every announced name elicited that single, synchronized clap from the crowd.

Of course. Monkey hear, monkey do.

This emergent phenomenon got me thinking about lots of things: synchronous behaviors in humans, the sociology of groupthink, how sound travels in a gymnasium.

This is how science gets started.

So when a little publicized Physical Review Research study on the physics of clapping made the media rounds shortly afterward, I realized I hadn’t considered the acoustics of applause itself.

And now I'm feeling a little shortchanged, because I wanted to learn more about "synchronous behaviors in humans, the sociology of groupthink, how sound travels in a gymnasium." But, okay, at least I'll learn something.

Turns out that science had yet to fully elucidate the intricacies of sound produced by two hands brought rapidly together.

So, we couldn't even answer "what is the sound of two hands clapping?"

With an impressive variety of experimental methods—including recordings of clapping humans and models of soft plastic hand replicas—the researchers dissected the physics involved in several types of claps.

The article's description of the science is brief and probably oversimplified, but it's good to see this kind of research being done. No, it's not cutting-edge physics or a new paradigm in biology, but the more we understand, the better off we are. One never knows when such seemingly mundane science will have applications in unexpected places.

I'd end with a quip about applauding the scientists' efforts, but the article's author beat me to it. Sonofabitch stole my line.