Applause is an ancient, widespread collective behaviour by which an audience expresses appreciation at the conclusion of a collective event such as an artistic performance or a public ceremony. In some cultures, it is possible to observe a spontaneous transition from an initially incoherent to a surprisingly synchronised form of applause. Such kind of emergent behaviour has long since fascinated researchers from different disciplines. This paper shows a possible application of formal methods to study similar phenomena. The key idea is to model the audience as a concurrent system, where each person is a separate process that follows the same, simple behaviour. The model can then be automatically analysed to study the possible evolutions of the system as a whole, and in particular to assess the likelihood of emerging synchronisation.