FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

The Physics Of The Mosh Pit Could Help Design CG Crowd Scenes

Scientists have discovered that metallers head banging at a concert behave like particles in a gas.

If you’ve ever been in a mosh pit, you’ll know it can be a pretty hectic, nose bleeding experience. But what you probably didn’t know is that when you were body checking that guy in the “Lemmy is God” t-shirt you were acting like atoms do in a gas. “They found that the dancers’ speeds had the same statistical distribution as the speeds of particles in a gas. Such particles move around freely, interacting only when they bounce off one another.” the New Scientist reports. So there’s a bit of trivia you can take to your next Dethklok concert and attempt to tell your fellow moshers.

Advertisement

Jesse Silverberg, a fan of mosh pits and graduate student at Cornell University, New York, and three colleagues undertook the “first study of the collective motion of people at a rock concert” by studying YouTube videos of people going ape in a mosh pit and developed a computer simulation that predicted their behavior—including that swirling mass of bodies you get, the mosh vortex known as the circle pit.

The researchers said the results they found could have real world implications for architects when designing buildings to avoid crowd quakes and also for animators when creating realistic crowd scenes for movies and games.

[via New Scientist]

@stewart23rd