Outdoor concert sounds—Searching for acceptability criteria for communities adjacent to amphitheaters

Most municipal, state, and federal codes and regulations are inadequate for protecting residential communities adjacent to concert amphitheaters from annoyance due to sound of high‐level amplified music, as well as from other concert‐related sounds. From numerous consultations involving siting of new and evaluating existing amphitheaters, the author has evolved a criterion which appears to predict with sufficient accuracy the likely response of residential occupants to amphitheater sounds. This experience suggests that if the intrusions represented by the 1‐percentile A‐weighted levels are not more than 5 dB above the pre‐existing (i.e., nonconcert) background represented by the 90‐percentile levels, the intrusions are sufficiently immersed in and masked by the normal background and most communities are satisfied. However, some neighbors find the mere audibility or detectability of amphitheater sounds objectionable and measurement is at best difficult where the sound levels are of the same order of magnitude as the normal community background sound. The experience in developing and applying this signal‐to‐noise based criterion to several amphitheater projects, one of which has been in operation for over 15 years, is reviewed.