Experimental study on the influence of background music on pedestrian movement in high densities

Guang Zeng,Jun Zhang,Weiguo Song,Andreas Schadschneider

doi:10.17815/cd.2020.42

Guang Zeng, Jun Zhang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.17815/cd.2020.42

Copy DOI

Abstract

It is interesting to investigate the effect of background music on pedestrian movement. This paper investigates the properties of crowd motion with external rhythms. With rhythm, pedestrians stop more frequently than without any rhythm. The stopping also increases with the increment of the tempo. Velocity and flow with rhythms are lower than that without any rhythm at high densities due to the more frequent stopping. Stepping behavior analysis shows that the step frequency with rhythms is smaller than that without any rhythm, especially at high densities. Dynamic coordinated behavior is weakened by music, which also affectsthe stepping behavior. Our study will be helpful for understanding the effect of background music on pedestrian movement.

Highlights

Crowding is often observed especially in large cities, it is still not clear how to control crowd motion effectively
It was explained by cognition science that the rhythm could promote cognitive processes, which results in coordinated pedestrian flow motion[3].there is few work about the influence of background music on pedestrian movement, especially at high densities
Sejdic et al.[6] found that music does not have a natural influence on the walking behavior of pedestrians when a pedestrian walks on the ground.The effect of background music on pedestrian movement is not clear

Summary

1.Introduction

Crowding is often observed especially in large cities, it is still not clear how to control crowd motion effectively. How different tempos of rhythms influence pedestrian movement when pedestrians are not instructed to follow the rhythm, has not been investigated so far. A series of single-file experiments, six experiments with six different rhythms and one without any rhythms, are conducted to study pedestrian movement influenced by different rhythms. These rhythms include 90BPM, 120BPM and 150BPM rhythms from a pure music of a song called “Fade” and 90BPM, 120BPM and 150BPM rhythms produced by electronic metronome. 2.Experiment setup To investigate the effect of background music on pedestrian dynamics, we conducted a series of single-file experiments in Hefei, China. A total of 77 runs of the experiment were performed.For more details of the experiment we refer to[10]

Results and analysis

Fundamental diagram

Conclusion