Home field advantage can help propel a team to victory in just about any sport. In American football, a noisy crowd can make it difficult for opposing teams to effectively communicate, leading to false start penalties, and allowing defenders to get quicker jumps on the ball. In an effort to gain a greater home field advantage by increasing crowd noise, Penn State University will be rearranging the seating at Beaver Stadium, where the school’s football team plays. The university made the decision after graduate student Andrew Barnard performed a study in which he played recordings of simulated crowd noise at various points of an empty Beaver Stadium, and measured the resulting decibel levels on the field. He found that the southern end zone amplifies sound more effectively than any other part of the stadium. As a result, the student section, largely considered to be filled with the most raucous fans, will be located behind the southern end zone for the 2011 season.

This got me thinking- what is it about the architecture of certain stadiums that make them louder than others? For instance, Qwest Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks, is widely regarded to be one of the loudest venues in the NFL, despite the fact that it is an open air stadium. After reading the Wikipedia article, I discovered that Qwest Field can achieve this distinction by combining steep seating decks and an overhanging roof with metal bleachers to help reflect noise back onto the field in an effective manner.

While architects of sports stadiums may want to increase crowd noise, a loud, echo-filled environment can make conference calls truly unbearable. GIPS specializes in designing software to improve the user experience in all forms of voice and video communication. However, even the best software can be ineffective if environmental factors conspire to create a poor conference call. That is why anyone setting up a conference room should learn from places like Qwest Field, and heed the following tips to minimize echo and noise:

1. Acoustic echo is created when a microphone picks up the speech of the person on the other end of the phone call coming through the receiving side speaker. As obvious as it may sound, the best way to avoid echo is by making sure the speaker and microphone are a sufficient distance apart, and if possible, pointed away from each other.
2. Unlike in football stadiums, hard surfaces should be avoided in a conference setting. Carpeted floors and curtains over windows can actually go a long way toward reducing the amount of echo in a room, thus improving the user experience in a conference call.
3. Similarly, flat, parallel surfaces can cause sound to bounce back and forth, making echo more dramatic. If at all possible, avoid placing the speaker and microphone close to a wall or other large, flat object. This can be difficult since speaker phones are commonly placed on a large table in most conference rooms. However, echo can still be reduced by making sure the ceiling is not too low, and is not uniformly flat. A tall ceiling with overhanging lights or sound dampening panels can go a long way toward creating a good setup for conference calls.