Three times the density, less contact. Where does it go?
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.
Front of stage runs at 3.0 people per square metre; a beer tent at 1.1. Nearly three times the packing, and by every naive account of how crowds work it should produce far more contact.
It produces less: 15.1 encounters per person per hour against 17.1. The tent also leaves 25 percent more lasting ties, from a third of the density.
Two things drain it. The festival crowd runs at 105 dB, so speech survives 58 centimetres against the tent's 1.4 metres. And everyone is oriented the same way, at something engineered to hold their attention — the model allows a quarter of it for the people physically touching them, against 0.95 in the tent. A festival crowd is thousands of people having the same experience in parallel. A beer tent is a few hundred having one together.
