Av Acoustics

Environmental Noise Impact Of Outdoor Hospitality Services

In hospitality industry, outdoor restaurants and lounges have a very critical yet common expectation - to provide good audio reinforcement. This article by Mathew George of MMG Acoustical discusses the euphoria of the opening night, the problems faced in predominantly residential area by the space owners, the contribution of such spaces to environmental noise pollution, and the basic laws to abide by to avoid a probable shut down or legal problems.

In the hospitality industry, outdoor restaurants and lounges hold a particular appeal. The star hospitality segment prides in the provision of outdoor venue for banquets, restaurants, roof top lounges, infinity pool and pool deck to cater to the ever changing and growing demands of their customers. It is very common to expect a premium entry fee to such places.

While such space may be available, it is a very critical yet common expectation to provide very good audio reinforcement and occasionally video reproduction to make the space commercially viable for the owners and interesting for the customers.

Therefore, owners and promoters spare no expenses to ensure these spaces are provided with the very powerful and sophisticated audio amplifications systems. They buy from the best brands to improve the WOW factor of the space. The procurement, installation, and everything is completed to facilitate the opening of the space.

After the euphoria of opening night, soon as the space begins functional daily, the neighbors start to complain about the noise generated by the restaurant or lounge being too loud. The operation staffs attempt to reduce the noise levels and as a result, foul up the tuning and audio setup of the space. The owners again call the system integrators to reduce or resolve this issue. The system integrator retunes the space to initial settings, however the same cycle repeats.

After number of low level complaints, the neighbor complain to the police, whose best response is to advise reduced noise levels, or worst reaction is to shut down the premises on account of neighbor nuisance - Sounds familiar right? All the above can be reasonably linked to one concern – the contribution of such spaces to environmental noise pollution and neighbor annoyance.

According to National Building Code and noise zoning laws:

Area Code	Category of Area/Zone	Limits in DBA Leq
		Day Time	Night Time
A	Industrial Area	75	70
B	Commercial Area	65	55
C	Residential Area	55	45
D	Silence Zone	50	40

As many will know, the hospitality segment comes under the commercial area where as the residences come under residential area. Please note that as per law, it is required that any noise created outside a residential area should be less than 45 dBA between 6 PM and 6 AM. This is applicable for all mechanical equipment and audio reinforcement systems in spaces adjacent to the residential property.

Presently there is no law to deal with annoyance of music but that may come about in the future.

This is direct conflict with hospitality related commercial entities, which maximize their operations during these times. Needless to say, restaurants, lounges, and pubs in a predominantly residential space face a difficult time with neighbors, who want peace and quiet. This becomes more acute, when open air hospitality spaces or outdoor spaces with reasonably high noise energy acts.

Coming back to the proposed audio amplification system, the selection of these systems have a direct impact on the above concern. Given the outdoor conditions, the audio amplification system cannot derive any useful reflection to improve or maintain the quality of the content played. It needs to be powerful enough to do that and reach the required audience. However if the audio amplification systems are extremely high powered, the owners need to spend more money on the containment of the sound, which defeats the purpose of being an outdoor venue. Hence a catch 22 situation!!

Therefore it is advisable to sound system designer and integrators to evaluate and design the selection of the proposed sound system to ensure there is good reach to the audience area yet reduced noise leakage to the unintended areas. There are useful tools/ software such as EASE, ODEON and others, which help the designer or integrator to design the selection of the audio amplification system.

With ODEON or SOUND PLAN among others, one can understand extent of noise propagation under outdoor conditions and would help to designer to tweak the design to minimize the external noise leakage as best feasible. Use of barriers can help to some degree but one must always remember that excess sound will overflow the space as excess water does within a tumbler.

One should not ignore the contribution of external ambient noise round the commercial property, which can be beneficial to mask the leaked audio content within the existing external ambient noise. A survey of the present ambient noise levels around the commercial property will definitely help optimize the proposed selection of the audio amplification system.

As with any design recommendation, the earlier the recommendations for the acoustics and audio and video design are incorporated in the architectural / interior design of the space, the lesser the rework.