From cheers at the Brier to songs for the Raptors, this MUN researcher is studying the sounds of sports

Bouncing balls, blowing whistles and roaring crowds are all sounds you may hear at a sporting event.

For Jordan Zalis, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Memorial University, it's music to his researching ears.

Along with being a music lover, he's also a huge fan of sports. What we hear while watching sports says a lot about who we are as a society, he says.

"One of the the really interesting ideas has to do with sports ability to reproduce ideas from romantic nationalism," told CBC News.

"You have a team you're a fan of. You wear the same colours. You have your turf, you have away games, but you celebrate."

For Zalis, it's not just sport — he sees it as theatre.

"What sport teaches us is that it's totally normal and totally acceptable to get along with perfect strangers and wear the same colours and cheer for people we don't know in a simulated battle at Centre Court."

When the crowd is cheering, Zalis said, there can be a visceral sense of oneness in a room uniting complete strangers. It's something he says is almost like a religion, as in the French sociologist Émile Durkheim's theory of collective effervescence.

"People being together in close proximity, believing the same thought, participating in the same actions. And it gets you to this point of almost ecstasy," said Zalis.

His interest in the sound of sports started in high school, when his school in Winnipeg got a new pep band for football and basketball games. From there, he says, he started looking into the history of marching bands and the military, and was fascinated by the group solidarity that� music created.

He sees stadium anthems like We Are the Champions as having those same effects.

In 2017, he and fellow researcher Diego Pani studied the sounds of