Silent disco started back in the 1970s as a convenient way to get around noise restrictions. In those days, that meant everyone bringing their own music loaded on to a Walkman. Later, DJs would set up their own radio channels to allow everyone to listen to the same playlist.
These events gained popularity in the early 2000s, when music festivals began to host silent gigs with lots of artists streaming on different channels. At a regular disco or nightclub, everybody experiences dancing together in time to the same music. But at a silent disco, people can be dancing in the same space but out of time with each other, if they’re listening to different music across several channels.
This can be a strange experience, but it does provide a very useful context to study the importance of synchrony - more commonly known as being “in sync” on the dance floor. So what does the “silent disco” phenomenon tell us about dance ? Researchers have used it to study social dynamics, finding it interferes with the social bonding effects of dance. Silent disco may even help us to better understand the evolution of musicality and our rhythmic abilities.
As a cognitive anthropologist, my work looks at why humans spend so much time singing and dancing, and I am particularly interested in how dance “works” as a social activity. Silent disco in the lab In a recent study using a silent disco experiment, I wanted to find out how important it was for dancers to be in sync. Since people were .