Sub-bass at extreme volumes produces physical, full-body crowd responses that feel like a delayed wave through the audience

Mala describes witnessing something at DMZ that he had only previously seen at Jah Shaka roots reggae dances: ‘I remember when certain basslines would roll out; it would be almost like a delayed reaction in the dance. The time it would take for the low, low bottom-end frequency to go through someone’s body, you would see and almost hear the audience respond at a slight delay from each other the further back in the dance you go, as the bass wave is physically moving through people.’ This is an acoustic phenomenon: low-frequency waves travel at the speed of sound, so there is a measurable time lag between the speaker and the back of a large room. The crowd’s physical response propagates visually as a wave, confirming that the bass is exerting physical, not just aesthetic, force.

Examples

At the DMZ first birthday in 2005, Joe Nice described being ‘in a cocoon of sub frequency’ with a rig ‘with no limiters, in a room with 30ft ceilings, pummeling you with bass.‘

Assessment

Explain the physical mechanism behind Mala’s observation of ‘a delayed reaction’ in the crowd as the bass wave moves through them, and describe what this tells us about the role of sub-bass in dubstep’s intended experience.