Alcohol or volume — which one is actually doing the work?
Conditions are published figures or derived from them. Output is measured from a standard run — 1,200 people, 4 hours, fixed seed, identical for both rooms. A highlighted cell is only marked where “more” is actually better; density and volume are conditions, not scores.
Both rooms serve, both are packed, and their encounter rates are within five percent of each other: 17.1 per person per hour in the tent against 17.9 in the warehouse. On raw contact they are the same venue.
They diverge on what survives. The tent leaves 668 lasting ties, the warehouse 599 — from fewer encounters. The tent also carries almost twice the blood alcohol: 67 mg per 100 ml against 30, which puts its average drinker close to the peak of the social facilitation window rather than below it.
The separating variable is the 18 dB between them. At 88 dB the tent holds a 1.4 metre speech range, wide enough to include a table; at 106 dB the warehouse collapses to 55 centimetres, the shortest on this site. Both rooms manufacture the same number of encounters. Only one of them lets an encounter become a conversation.
