(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – In a vivid example showcasing the power of her celebrity with her fans and how that impacts her concerts, a professor from Western Washington University who studies rocks and earthquakes found out something odd about the infamous singer’s concerts in Seattle.
The professor found out that the shows were causing vibrations similar to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake. At the time, it was not clear if the fans or the sound systems caused the seismic activity. Yet, it was not the last time that sources reported shaking during a Swift performance.
In August, a group of scientists from Caltech and UCLA was interested in the ground-shaking phenomenon that occurred during Taylor’s show at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
The researchers even authored an article titled “Shake to the Beat: Exploring the Seismic Signals and Stadium Response of Concerts and Music Fans.” On that evening, Swift performed in front of about 70,000 people.
The study noted that “Signals were recorded on regional seismic network stations located within 9 km (about 5.59 miles) of the stadium, as well as on strong‐motion sensors placed near and inside the stadium prior to the concert series.”
Using spectrograms, which displayed signal frequencies over time, the investigators associated the signals with individual songs and analyzed their seismic sources.
“For earthquakes, most of the time they’re pretty sharp and easy to identify with waveforms, but when you have something like volcanoes where you have such a wide variety of signals, spectrograms can be really handy in helping to identify the different types of signals,” Gabrielle Tepp from Caltech explained.
The experiment revealed that each Swift song had a unique tremor signal while researchers successfully identified 43 out of the 45 songs played within the recorded spectrograms.
Likewise, the scientists then calculated the energy radiated by each song and converted it into the local magnitude of an earthquake that would have released the same energy.
Interestingly, Swift’s song “Shake It Off” produced the highest local magnitude at 0.851.
“Keep in mind this energy was released over a few minutes compared to a second for an earthquake of that size. Based on the maximum strength of shaking, the strongest tremor was equivalent to a magnitude-2 earthquake,” Tepp clarified.
After careful consideration, it was concluded that the dancing and jumping motions of the audience at SoFi Stadium generated the concert’s distinct harmonic tremors rather than the musical beats or sound system reverberations.
Copyright 2024, ReclaimingAmerica.net
