On July 19, at the FIFA World Cup Final between Argentina and Spain, the halftime show gave the tournament’s most unlikely viral moment a global stage.
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, leading the Muppets, the New York Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, cued a segment built around Norway’s “Viking Row”. It was a fitting tribute by some of the world’s most rehearsed musicians to the tournament’s most spontaneous, unrehearsed piece of rhythmic chant.
It raises a question two UBC School of Music professors have spent the tournament thinking about: what actually happens when thousands of strangers with no rehearsal, and often no shared language, fall into the exact same rhythm at the exact same moment? They’ll clap together. Chant together. Sing together. Sway together. In Norway’s case, they’ll even row an invisible longship together, in time, to a drumbeat.
Surely, it’s magic! Some sorcery that produces such cohesion among strangers. It isn’t. According to Nathan Hesselink and Robert Komaniecki, two UBC School of Music faculty members, it’s a phenomenon with a name and a set of rules almost as rigorous as anything in a symphony.
Norwegian supporters performing the 'Viking Row' at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Photo by Bryan Berlin/WikiPortraits- WikiMedia Commons.
The oldest trick in the human songbook
“They are tapping into a very old and foundational capacity of humans known as entrainment, which is the ability to perceive an external beat and to synchronize our bodily movements to it,” says Nathan Hesselink, a professor of global musicology at UBC and author of Finding the Beat: Entrainment, Rhythmic Play, and Social Meaning in Rock Music. “It is actually a highly complex mental and physical ability, engaging both recent and ancient structures of the brain.”
Entrainment, Hesselink explains, isn’t a party trick humans picked up recently. It is ancient, and it may have given us a survival advantage. It is “credited with providing early modern human populations distinct advantages in terms of being able to work and play together,” he says, and it likely helped give rise to music and dance themselves. Why we find it so pleasurable is still something of a mystery. “For reasons not entirely known, humans in general derive great pleasure from this ability.”
He’s careful to note that while entrainment is usually discussed for its upside, building cooperation, bonding, and joy, at the same time it has an equally less comfortable use. “There is a very good chance that coordinating our movements and sounds helped proto-human societies to conquer other early hominid communities, and combined with heated emotions, entrainment does hold the potential for undesirable activity such as aggression and violence.” For Hesselink, this brings the chants closer to war cries.
A stadium, it turns out, is close to the ideal venue for producing it. “Structurally speaking, most stadiums are arranged in a large circular form, which allows onlookers to see each other as a group at the same time,” Hesselink says. Because it’s hard to isolate individual sounds over a crowd’s roar, sight becomes just as important as sound for staying in sync. “The visual element is an important part of being able to coordinate one’s movements and/or voices with others.” And stadiums, unlike concert halls or churches, actively encourage people to get loud and get up out of their seats thus removing, as Hesselink puts it, one more barrier to joining in.
“Entrainment ... is the ability to perceive an external beat and to synchronize our bodily movements to it.”
Row, row, row your way into the record books
Nothing has demonstrated that principle this tournament quite like Norway’s “Viking Row” where an entire supporter section while sitting down, mimes an oar stroke, and chants a single syllable, “ro,” as a drummer sets and gradually accelerates the pace.
“One standout chant of the tournament has undeniably been Norway’s ‘Viking Row’ chant,” says Robert Komaniecki, a UBC music theory lecturer whose research explores the rhyme, rhythm and vocal pitch that make hip-hop unique. “It’s perfect for a stadium atmosphere: A leader signals with a war horn, then a drummer slams two strikes on his instrument, followed by the signature unison shout of ‘ro!’ from the fans as they pantomime rowing a ship.”
What makes it work, according to Komaniecki, isn’t just the simplicity but what happens to that simplicity over time. “The other thing that makes this chant work well is the inevitable acceleration as the rowing picks up speed, which plays into the seemingly natural phenomenon of crowds of high-energy people always tending to push the tempo forward of any unison clapping or chant.”
Hesselink, watching the same phenomenon through the lens of entrainment science, sees something slightly more unusual than a typical soccer chant. “Most crowd cheers or chants are matched to a steady beat, and they generally stay at the same tempo,” he says. “What we’re seeing with Norway’s ‘Viking Row’ or Iceland’s ‘Thunderclap’ in the current FIFA Men’s World Cup, however, is considerably different.” Both begin slow and build. “Norway’s rowing does include a drum beat, but even so, both chants require a pretty complex set of mental abilities coming together in a single moment of time. These soccer chants rely much more on visual synchronization than on aural ones.”
And that synchronization, per Hesselink, doesn’t take long to click into place. “In the case of sports chants, most people want to be at the game, are enthused about their team, and perhaps already know the chant or song that is used. Under such circumstances, the ability to entrain would happen almost immediately — though it would still take a second or two to dial in to the speed or movement of the stimulus.”
“Norway's rowing does include a drum beat, but even so, both chants require a pretty complex set of mental abilities coming together in a single moment of time. These soccer chants rely much more on visual synchronization than on aural ones.”
Why 50,000 people always know the words
Not every crowd moment at this World Cup involves rowing. Some of the loudest have been English fans, drunk on victory and several pints, belting out Oasis’s “Wonderwall” word for word, and, more often than not, somehow landing in Liam Gallagher’s original key.
“It’s an impressive bit of in-group signalling — a massive crowd of soccer lads singing along to every word, usually somehow even managing to end up in Liam Gallagher’s original key,” Komaniecki says. “England’s ‘Wonderwall’ performances are an expression of shared cultural background, an acknowledgement of the similarities in their collective upbringings hanging out in British pubs and hearing the song on the radio when they were children.”
That’s no accident, either. It’s a workaround for a very practical problem: a stadium has no rehearsal time. “With soccer chants, there’s no time to rehearse, no time to make changes, the music is immediate,” Komaniecki says. “Your best bet at getting a cohesive, enthusiastic, and comprehensible performance from a stadium of rowdy fans is to set simple lyrics to a melody that many people already know, like ‘Yankee Doodle’ or ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.'” But borrowing a familiar tune isn’t laziness. “It is a reminder of your shared life experience and backgrounds, strengthening your bonds as a group of fans.”
There’s also a reason repetition feels so good rather than tedious. “Studies have shown that people prefer music that is more repetitive,” Komaniecki says. “Even if somebody doesn’t particularly enjoy a melody or rhythm initially, exposure to repetitions of those sounds often causes them to memorize and even begin to enjoy it.” He connects this back to a broader theory about how our brains are wired to work. “Being able to predict the outcome of a pattern is gratifying to some ancient part of our brains that seeks to rationalize and order our surroundings.” Entrainment runs deep.
“With soccer chants, there's no time to rehearse, no time to make changes, the music is immediate”
A shout versus a song
Not all chants are built the same way, and Komaniecki argues the split comes down to timing. A rhythmic call-and-response, for example, “Ca-na-da! Ca-na-da!” echoing through the Canadian supporters’ section, can be deployed the instant it’s needed. “Rhythmic call-and-response chants are perfect for deploying at a moment’s notice or spontaneously, perhaps as a corner kick is lined up or a yellow card is doled out. In split-second moments where fans want to create energy and noise, forgoing song and focusing on rhythm is the way to go.”
A fully melodic chant like something in the register of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” asks more of a crowd, and shows off more when it lands. “Melodic chants, however, are a more impressive undertaking and generally work to show off the degree of cohesion of a fan section.”
It’s a distinction that shows up in how Canada’s own supporters have built their sound this tournament. “Canada’s soccer chants like “Ca-na-da! Ca-na-da! Come on you boys in red!” and the bilingual “Allez les rouges,” reflect a team and a culture that is eager to find a lasting place in the upper echelons of the already-established tradition of soccer in Europe, Africa, and South America,” Komaniecki says. “Canadian soccer chants are often amalgamations and reworkings of various chants from different soccer clubs around the world. The result is a fan section representative of Canada more broadly — a cultural and linguistic mosaic, and a group of fans that embraces their own shared past as much as it embraces their unique differences.”
“Canadian soccer chants are often amalgamations and reworkings of various chants from different soccer clubs around the world. The result is a fan section representative of Canada more broadly — a cultural and linguistic mosaic...”
The universal choir
Both scholars, independently, were taken by surprise once they actually sat down and analyzed what a stadium full of strangers can do.
Komaniecki found the degree of cohesion among the large groups particularly impressive. “Some of these fan sections are legitimately musical!” Komaniecki says. “I’ve been in choirs with baritone/tenor sections that are significantly less in-tune and more timid than the surprisingly-in-tune belting of the English fans. Next time I’m directing an ensemble and the men are not singing well, I’ll have to consider loosening up their vocal cords with a couple pints and a good game of soccer.”
Hesselink’s surprise runs a little more scientific. “I am still fascinated by how entrainment engages so many possible senses and abilities of us as humans,” he says. “The most obvious are synchronized movements tied to sound and sight, but there is also research that explores our ability to entrain through bodily sensation alone. This means that entrainment is an ability shared by nearly all humankind, regardless of physical (dis)abilities.”
It is this universal ability that was on full display throughout the tournament, and one that came full circle on the World Cup’s biggest stage. On July 19, when Dudamel’s orchestras cued the Viking Row in front of a packed stadium and millions more watching worldwide, nobody in the stands had practiced, and nobody had been handed sheet music. The tournament may be over but according to the people who study this for a living, what tens of thousands of strangers built together in the stands was, unmistakably, music – one that will continue to live on.
