Contagious Sound

Yawns are contagious.

Swine flu is contagious.

What about noise?

Certainly, sound is memorable; I could go on for a bit now about echoic memory and how sound is interpreted in the brain...but I won't...anyway, everyone knows how a snippet of the latest excruciating pop disaster bounces around one's skull for days on end, and my sister (okay, my whole family) is a living example of how song lyrics, movie lines, and other odd snippets of conversation become ingrained in the mind - we have been known to have whole conversations in words that aren't actually ours.

Also, accents are quite sticky (some more than others): while I never picked up RP while living in Oxford, I had to make a conscious effort not to do so (on grounds of avoiding pretension and general poseurhood). And I can still, with minimal effort, recall the cadences and turns of phrase of a high school friend whose way of speaking was outstandingly contagious.

Tonight I was at a Penguin's game - and this is not such a change of subject as you might think, because midway through the second period, someone somewhere in the crowd started making this noise. It was a strange howling noise, somewhere between redneck and etherial (I know), starting quite high and dropping off quickly. By the end of the third, the entire stadium was howling like General Lee's rebel army.

Why? No one knows. It was "fun"...doing it once, quietly to myself, only made me want to do it more exuberantly. Wikipedia sheds no further light, though...If I were a true scientist, I would conduct further studies. But I'm on Christmas vacation.