Speaker
Description
Outdoor music festivals are often organized outside urban areas to minimize nuisances for city dwellers. This results in possible proximity of festivals to natural areas and potential impact on biodiversity in these areas. However, assessments of festival impact often use anthropocentric modelling or monitoring, approaches. Music is targeted at human experience and therefore its frequency range and spectral temporal modulations aim at creating an emotional response in humans. Other organisms may exhibit different responses to humans. Hence, it is proposed to focus assessment on the relevant taxa by including their hearing thresholds. Moreover, we propose combining impact monitoring with passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of biodiversity. The proposed approach is tested at a medium-sized outdoor music festival in Flanders. During successive editions, directivity of the loudspeaker arrangement was suggested as a mitigation measure. To validate the directivity of the loudspeaker arrangement, drone-based mobile acoustic measurements were performed.