👀 Cough Cough Cough
As a regular concert-goer (I'm talking five times a month, on average), I can confidently say that I have a thorough knowledge of audience-originated sounds and noises that piss off performers on stage.
The biggest offender has to be the mobile ringtone, followed by audio replays of videos that weren't supposed to be shot in the first place. There are also toddlers crying, but people tend to show more mercy in those cases (God knows why). But perhaps the most frequent sound heard from the audience—one that cannot be prohibited because it's a bodily phenomenon—is coughing.
I'm not talking about muffled coughs to soothe a dehydrated throat. I'm talking about those loud, raspy, harrowing coughs that make people around the cougher wonder whether they should be in an emergency room instead of a concert hall. The number of such coughs coughed emitted during concerts seems to have gone up across the globe (trust me bro). I blame the miserable quality of our air. Maybe someone someday will conduct a study and correlate these things (definitely not me).
I wish someone had already done the study, and I could link it here to back up my claims. I can't do that, but I can introduce you to today's Thing: The Concert Cougher. It's an interactive experience where you can press a button to cough during a piano recital. It's wicked, it's cheeky and weirdly addictive.
Cough on.
And here's some further reading.Â