Music performance space, Yorkshire

The challenge

A music teaching business wanted to take over the warehouse unit next to its existing premises and turn it into a teaching studio and small performance space seating up to a hundred. Lessons on weekday afternoons and evenings, occasional live music at weekends finishing by eleven, nothing overnight.

The unit is in an employment area, but houses sit not far to the east with nothing meaningful in the way. The council raised no objection in principle but wanted the noise assessed, and its environmental health officer made a fair point: the usual standards do not really fit music. He suggested targets for inside the neighbours' homes, with particular attention to bass.

That request contains a trap. Predicting the level *inside* somebody else's house means guessing how good their windows are and whether they are open, neither of which anyone can know. An assessment built on those guesses is easy to attack.

What we did

We monitored for five days including a full weekend, and set the limits *outside* the neighbours' homes instead, against the background actually measured there. Published guidance for exactly this situation controls entertainment noise to a set margin below the background at each frequency, assuming windows are open, which is a tougher test than the officer had proposed, so it satisfied his requirement with room to spare and removed the guesswork.

The controlling period is the evening, when it is quietest and the venue is busiest.

For the source we assumed a full rock band with a real drum kit, deliberately worse than the operator's intended setup, where an electronic kit means everything runs through the PA and can be turned down.

Then we worked out how much each part of the building leaks, element by element. The answer was that the roof was the weak point by a long way, and the fix was an independent lined ceiling built beneath the existing metal roof. The large sliding warehouse door gets bricked up and the remaining doors replaced with properly sealed ones. No credit was taken for the buildings in between, even though they do break the line of sight.