American scientists from the California Institute of Technology examined the seismic results of the concert given by popular singer Taylor Swift in Los Angeles in August 2023. They concluded that the crowd of 70,000 fans at SoFi Stadium created ground vibrations of strength comparable to a small earthquake. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Seismological Research Letters (SRL).
Experts analyzed the ground shaking during the performance and came to the conclusion that they could decipher the singer’s individual compositions based on the nature of rhythmic vibrations.
Previous research has shown that “concert jitter” can be recorded as long-duration signals with narrowband harmonic frequency peaks between 1 and 10 hertz. This type of low-frequency signal represents harmonic vibrations from both natural and man-made sources.
Scientists have discovered that each Taylor Swift song has its own unique signal. The team was able to identify 43 of the artist’s 45 works from spectrograms.
They also calculated the radiated energy of each song and interpreted this number based on the local magnitude of the earthquake. The most seismically active track was Shake It Off, with an average magnitude of 0.851, and the maximum energy during the concert was equivalent to a magnitude 2 earthquake.
Seismologists stated that the earthquake at the pop star’s concert was much stronger than the rock band Metallica’s concert at the same venue. Even though Metallica plays much heavier music, its fans appear much less likely to lip-sync compared to Taylor Swift fans, scientists explained.
Previous scientists I learnedHe said that the seismic vibrations that occur when a space object falls to Earth come from an ordinary truck, not an alien ship.