On the origin of seismic signals from concerts and its potential use to monitor stadium health

Shane Zhang, Huiyun Guo, Abellaine Murti, Parisa B. Vazira, Flora Y. Lo, Jacob T. Chow, Ariel Raymond, Qiushi Zhai, Igor Stubailo, Gabrielle Tepp, Monica D. Kohler, & Zhongwen Zhan

Submitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14338, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

Fans’ movement and music from concerts can generate seismic waves, but the exact mechanism and the role of the stadium remain unclear. The Weeknd concert series at SoFi stadium in June 2025 set the record of most sold-out shows and thus provides a unique opportunity to study concert seismic waves. We deployed Raspberry Shakes and geophone nodes near SoFi stadium, and both recorded repeatable seismic signals from all four The Weeknd concerts. The low-frequency harmonic tremors (1Hz to 10Hz) match the duration of the songs and mostly have a frequency of once or twice the tempo (beats per minute) of the songs (the first two harmonics), likely originating from fan movement. The tremors are reproduced by a lab experiment with people jumping. The Dirac comb model can largely explain the accentuation of the lowest harmonics where the perturbation in repeating jump intervals from different people cause higher harmonics to destructively interfere. While the generation of tremor does not require a stadium, the stadium might amplify the signal, as suggested by the apparent source location. The high-frequency signals (>40Hz) are correlated with the music and are likely excited by acoustic waves. A lab experiment with both geophones and DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) shows that acoustic signals can be recorded. Moreover, high frequency signals are missing from concerts in the nearby Kia Forum stadium, which is more enclosed than SoFi and makes it harder for sound to propagate out. Therefore, both low- and high-frequency seismic waves are likely modulated by the stadium. Since SoFi will hold global events such as the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics, concert seismic waves might provide a recurring and somewhat repeatable source to monitor the stadium’s health.

Citation
Zhang, S., Guo, H., Murti, A., Vazira, P. B., Lo, F. Y., Chow, J. T., Raymond, A., Zhai, Q., Stubailo, I., Tepp, G., Kohler, M. D., & Zhan, Z. (2025, 09). On the origin of seismic signals from concerts and its potential use to monitor stadium health. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Seismology