Tottenham's new 61,000-seater stadium engineered to make chants sound louder than they actually are
The first pictures of the £750m stadium were released last week
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Your support makes all the difference.Tottenham’s new 61,000-seater stadium has been designed to help Spurs fans generate more of an atmosphere by amplifying the sound of their chanting, say architectural firm Populous.
Spurs will move to the new venue, only a stone’s throw away from their current White Hart Lane home, for the 2018/19 season but will spend the 2017/18 campaign playing at Wembley.
Pictures of the £750m stadium, which comes complete with an in-house brewery, were released last week and show a ‘Tunnel Club’ which allows fans to dine while watching the players prepare for the game through a glass wall.
But in trying to recreate the atmosphere often achieved at White Hart Lane, ‘acousticians’ were enlisted, with Populous’ managing director claiming the stadium has been designed more like a concert hall than a football stadium, to create “more clean reverberation times” meaning chants last longer.
They also boosted the potential noise with a curvature of the stadium roof, and even the padding of seats.
“The studies we've done show when you start breaking up acoustics everyone gets out of sync so they stop singing,” said Christopher Lee in an interview with GQ.
“So once they create acoustics where they don't break down, the reverberation times are quicker, they last longer and get louder. The louder people get, the louder people around them get, and so the atmosphere and the noise builds.
“[We've even looked into] how much padding do we have in the seats, where do we have that padding in the seats, which also deals with acoustics.”
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