The Spanish football league, LaLiga has conducted a sound experiment to prove that irrespective of their clubs, football fans are united by a common factor that goes beyond their passion for their clubs.
This experiment, under the motto; “When we feel together, we feel stronger,” was put together with the goal of fostering better unity amongst LaLiga Santander and SmartBank fans.
Therefore, 42 fans, one for each club, took part in the groundbreaking sound experiment, recording of the rhythm of fans’ heartbeats to the tempo of the new LaLiga soundtrack, composed by Lucas Vidal in Spain.
To have successfully pulled this off, LaLiga started a campaign a few months ago calling on fans who always sing throughout the game in support of their team.
More than 4,000 people signed up for the initiative and finally, 42 supporters were selected, from eight different nationalities.
All of them enthusiastically went to Madrid, without knowing what surprise LaLiga had in store for them. When the fans arrived, they anonymously took part in the sound experiment, without knowing the origin or club of the supporter standing next to them.
Speaking on the sound experiment, LaLiga’s global brand and assets director, Enrique Moreno said;
“The passion for football is something that all fans share. Sometimes rivalry makes us lose sight of that. At LaLiga we are convinced that football is a great link that connects and brings together everyone who loves the sport.”
The project was inspired by a scientific study carried out a few years ago by the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), which showed that if several people sang the same song simultaneously, their heart rates synchronize with each other, going up and down together, which is linked to their synchronized breathing when they sing the same song.
Consequently, the LaLiga embarked on this experiment, inspired by a group of 18-year-old individuals with mixed gender, with real fans in a single day, under the concept ‘When we feel together, we feel stronger.’
Under the supervision of Dr.Tania Rodríguez Gabella, cardiologist at the Clínico University Hospital in Valladolid, some parameters to ensure the measurements were in accordance with the characteristics of each individual, marking a specific frequency range in which we expected all fans to be at the end of the experiment was put in place.
In addition to this, the frequency of each fan was measured using heart rate monitors, which sent the signal to a common screen in which Rodríguez Gabella and scientists monitored the evolution of the beats.
Hours after the start of the test, the initial objective was achieved, with figures of 95% or 100% of matched subjects were reached in some sections of the melody.
Composer, Lucas Vidal had this to say about the project;
“It has been a beautiful project, we have all been infected with the energy and enthusiasm of the fans and this is something that can be seen in the result obtained: a video that speaks about harmony and passion for football,” said the laureate Uruguayan director.
One of the key points of the experiment was the anonymity of all participants, which was with the intention of carrying out the initiative in the purest possible way and fans arrived at the venue of the experiment dressed in shirts and black trousers.
Finally, as their hearts were beating in unison, the fans were asked to reveal their club kits by the composer and choir director, Vidal.
At the end, the sound experiment is a project that highlights the importance nowadays of extolling the aspects that unite us above those that separate us.
