AN EVALUATION OF UK AND INTERNATIONAL GUIDANCE FOR THE CONTROL OF NOISE AT OUTDOOR EVENTS

The most current guidance document used in the UK for the control of music noise at events is the ‘Noise Council, code of practice on environmental noise control at concerts, 1995’ (referred to going forward as the ‘Pop Code’). The published levels from the Noise Council are presented in Table 1 below. Table 1 - Summary of the suggested limits presented in the Pop Code Research undertaken in 2006 (Griffiths & Staunton, 2006) suggested that the guidance would benefit from further refinements to the noise levels, the number of concerts and the categories used. However, this research was never progressed further and at the time of writing this current article in September 2020, the Pop Code remains the most up-to-date guidance on the control of music noise at events. While the Pop Code is currently the main guidance document in the UK, it is not uncommon for individual events to deviate from that guidance.