Experimental study on the effect of background music on pedestrian movement at high density.

Highlights • Pedestrian dynamics with background music is investigated. • Fundamental diagrams with rhythm and without rhythm are compared. • Coexistence of two phases with rhythm is analyzed. Abstract Although crowding is often observed in large cities, it is still not known how to control it. Rhythm is a potential method to improve pedestrian flow. This paper investigates the effect of background music on pedestrian movement. Six experiments with different background rhythms and an experiment under normal condition (without any rhythm) are conducted to study the issue. Fundamental diagrams show that velocity and flow with background music at medium and high densities will be smaller than those under normal conditions. With music, stop-and-go behavior is more frequently observed due to a higher stopping headway and a higher restarting headway. Stopping duration analysis shows that pedestrians stop longer with music. Therefore it has to be considered as another factor for jam formation in pedestrian traffic besides density and inhomogeneities. Because of the weaker dynamic coordinate behavior (slower response to the motion of the frontal pedestrians), pedestrians need more time to prevent conflicts and step consecutively at high densities in the presence of music. Decreasing step frequency with rhythm at high density also results in stopping more frequently. Our study will be helpful for understanding the effect of music, especially background music, on pedestrian movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]