From gospel, soul, disco and house, the 51st State Festival has become a showcase for dance music. As well hosting seven stages at London’s Copthall Playing Fields, the festival organisers had to consider noise pollution and potentially adverse impacts on the local community. Southby Productions and environmental noise control specialist Three Spire Acoustics used a suite of d&b audiotechnik tools to ensure their success.
Copthall Playing Fields was a new location for the festival, and marked the venue’s transition to a large-scale event. The local council had limited experience of festivals in the borough, and required a plan to manage sound levels be in place ahead of time.
d&b NoizCalc was designed in collaboration with software developer SoundPlan, and is able to predict sound propagation from multiple coherent sources, such as line arrays and subwoofer arrays, allowing system designers to anticipate potential issues before rigging an event.
‘NoizCalc assisted in understanding potential noise pollution dispersion from the site and was instrumental in providing the client with different options for orientation and location of stages,’ reports Three Spires Acoustics Director, Chris Hurst.
In addition, the team used a new workflow feature within NoizCalc 3.0 – reSum. This new workflow feature enables post-calc changes without the total recalculation time. ‘Our team at Southby are huge fans of the reSum feature set, which is particularly useful when working across an entire festival site with six different ArrayCalcs,’ says Southby Productions Technical Director, Digby Shaw.
Using NoizCalc, the team secured approval for the event to take place with d&b partner Southby deploying d&b KSL line arrays across all seven stages. The cardioid dispersion of KSL proved the optimum solution for the festival main stage. KSL also proved a vital consideration on another stage, where the PA was set up near the rear of the tent. This prevented acoustic energy from the rear of the arrays being reflected and causing issues out front.
‘KSL is a system we know we can rely on,’ states Southby Head of Production, Max Liddell. ‘From its rear rejection to its consistent horizontal dispersion, we never need to worry that the system wouldn’t perform flawlessly.’
Overall, the new format of the 51st State Festival proved to be a success. ‘Thanks to the combination of NoizCalc for viability assessment and the use of the latest “noisy” concert noise monitoring solution, we had a high degree of confidence in the noise management of the event, which would not have been so predictable and controllable using traditional techniques,’ Hurst closes.
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