Clapping is our personal, built-in percussion instrument. It's a social gesture that’s been accepted as a sound of admiration and approval. According to the Guinness Book of World Record, the loudest clap ever clocked in at 113 dB, and the world record for fastest clapping was recently set at 802 claps per minute. Clapping is the most common human body noise that doesn’t involve the vocal chords. At a fundamental and physiological level, the impulse to clap may have originated as a reaction to an overflowing of enthusiasm; an immediate and primitive reaction to excitement. Steven Connor, colorfully puts it this way, if the distinctive sound of human is the sound of language, then sound produced from other places than the mouth “always has the taint of the gratuitous(unjustified), the excessive, or the proscribed(forbid, prohibit). Clapping is the benign superflux of the body, the diarrhea of sound. He calls it a spilling over of feeling a burst of energy unfiltered by language or thought. It’s a way to burn off extra enthusiasm. But if clapping is so natural and involuntary to the individual how did it become coded into Western etiquette an expected behavior you sometimes feel pressured into, even if you don’t want to. Desmond Morris called modern clapping patting a performer on the back from a distance. Other theories have called it high fiving yourself for something someone else has done. But in its current form there is another thing, besides yourself, and the performance, that might be truly driving applause. A super organism called the crowd. A study published in the Journal of the Royal Society found that an individual's contribution to applause seems to have less to do with their actual opinion and has more to do with the behavior of the collective group. The anonymous group voice aspect of applause also makes sense when you consider the fact that clapping is a great equalizer. Studies have shown as opposed to voc