The loudest clap ever recorded clocked in at 113

decibels. And the world record for fastest clapping was recently set at

802 claps per minute. Clapping

is the most common human body noise others

are meant to hear that doesn't involve the vocal cords.

It's a great built-in percussion instrument.

But clapping has also become a collective social gesture that we use in

groups to express admiration,

approval. Especially for things that happen

on stage.

So here I am on stage. But to show approval, to show that they like

things, why do humans clap? Amazing question!

When applauding, a person creates claps at a rate of about 2.5-5 claps per

second.

Kinetic energy from the hands is converted into acoustic energy,

mainly within the 2200 to 2800 hertz

range, the frequencies clap on, clap off devices

detect. But many other frequencies are created during a single

clap. And different hand positions create different spectra

of frequencies, most of which are not whole number multiples of each other,

which is why a clap

can't make a musical note. A discernible

definite pitch the way a clarinet or piano

or the human voice can.

If vocalisations can be so finely controlled,

why clap? I mean, it's such a crude,

messy noise. Well, at a fundamental

and physiological level the impulse to clap

may have originated as a reaction to an overflowing

of enthusiasm, an immediate and primitive reaction

to excitement. Steven Connor colourfully puts it this way:

"If the distinctive sound of the human is the sound of

language, then sound produced from other places than the mouth,

always has the taint of the gratuitous,

the excessive, or the proscribed.

Clapping is the benign superflux of the body, the diarrhoea

of sound." He calls it a spilling over

of feeling. A burst of energy unfiltered by language

or thought. It's a way to burn off extra enthusiasm,

but if clapping is so natural and involuntary to the

individual, how did it become coded into western

etiquette? An expected behavior you sometimes feel pressured to do,

even if you don't want to. Desmond Morris called

modern clapping patting a performer on the back

from a distance. And other theories have called clapping

high fiving yourself for something someone else

has done. But in its current form there is another thing

besides yourself and the performance that might be truly driving

applause. A super organism called

The Crowd. A study published in the Journal of the Royal Society found that

an individual's contribution to applause seems to have less to do with their

actual

opinion as to the quality of the performance and has more to do with

the behavior

of the collective group,

the anonymous. Group voice aspect of applause

also makes sense, when you consider the fact that clapping is a great

equalizer. Studies have shown that, as opposed to vocalizations, which can

betray a lot

about the people who make them, subjects cannot guess better than chance,

whether the clap they hear is from a man or a woman,

nor can they guess the size of the individual, based solely

on the sound of their clap. Clapping

may have become the standard nonverbal gesture of admiration, because it is

arguably the loudest, the easiest and the most democratic.

Performers can't here a thumbs-up or

a wink. Not everyone can snap their fingers

and clapping is less disruptive than stomping feet or

waving around big objects. Moreover,

historically, authorities have encouraged

clapping. In the sixth century BC,

Cleisthenes came to power in Ancient Greece as a democratic reformer

and made behaviors like clapping a civic

duty, the proper way for the masses to express

admiration for their leader. There wasn't enough time for

everyone to meet and greet his or her leader,

but they could all greet their leader together,

as one super organism

with one voice - applause. By the early 19th century

the desire to code appropriate group reactions and

encourage them by example was quite official.

Agencies offered claques for hire,

professional applauders, who would memorize operas,

attend them, like normal opera goers, and clap,

cry or laugh at appropriate times, so that the

actual audience would know when to properly

do what. It's interesting that five or

six months after being born human babies begin to realize that their hands

can work together. Clapping is a natural reaction to this realization

but parenting books have to advise parents to teach

their children to connect clapping with group

happiness and celebration. The connection itself

not being inevitable. To this day,

applause signs reinforce audience behavior, simply because those with the

authority are requesting it. Not because

it is a natural reaction but because it can be, and

historically has been, socially imposed.

So, what's the future

of applauds? Well, last week

I hung out with the guys from Grand Illusions,

really fascinating channel. And they pointed out something strange.

How many times have you listened to your favorite song?

Probably quite a few, right? You've listened to songs you

don't like plenty of times. But as recently

as a 150 year ago, people

only heard their favorite symphony

maybe two or three times in their entire

life. If you wanted music, you had to go to a concert

or pick up an instrument or sing. There was no other

way. But now, because of recorded music,

MP3 players and phones and tablets and personal computers and digital libraries

allow us to be an

audience of one.

An audience all by ourselves, not just when professionals get together

and draw a crown. In the 1990s,

Faith Popcorn gave this broader phenomenon a name:

cocooning. The Internet, home entertainment,

cell phones, alarm systems, self-checkout,

filters for our personal air and water

are all paraphernalia of cocooning.

A tendency toward more lonely, solitary experiences in the last

30 years. In my episode about the friend zone,

I talk about how cocooning might be making

friendship, meeting new people and new unexpected ideas

a veining experience.

But applause is safe, right? I mean, applause isn't about meeting new

people, it's about becoming them.

Becoming a super organism that speaks with one

unindividuated roar. And concerts and live performances are still

big parts of our lives. But what's fascinating

is that more entertainment is more available

than ever before. And despite being TV shows,

movies, games and music, this

new entertainment is increasingly consumed

like books. In solitude,

alone. You don't need to applaud alone

in a cocoon, but to be sure, alone on the Internet we don't applaud but we do

like and share and favorite and retweet.

Those actions might be a sort of ersatz

applause. In real life your clap is

lost in the crowd, aggregated into the total sound.

And online, so are your likes and favorites.

They join a collective gesture as a sort of

digital applause. A pessimist might feel like these new collective gestures are

hollow, lonely, a sad replacement for actual

social experiences. But what's really happening?

Because a like is not necessarily

lonely. A retweet by its very nature isn't a clap

lost in the crowd, it's a clap that joins the crowd,

but is also traceable directly back to you.

Maybe cocooning, maybe the rise of applause

substitutes, like digital applause, is something

to be worried about, or maybe it's the natural result of having so many

applause-worthy things just a few clicks away.

We can't applaud all of them, so we have evolved more scaleable

reactions, which, incidentally, are more personal,

instead of being pathetic clicks

from an increasingly isolated, cocooned population.

Digital applause might be like something else that comes from cocoons

and having more of them. Something beautiful.

Butterflies.

And as always,

thanks for watching.