A Quiet Zone System for Open Air Concerts

This PhD thesis investigates quiet zone systems for outdoor concerts. The goal is to provide zones of silence close to the audience of outdoor concerts, in order to support communication or mitigate the exposure to large sound levels of the staff. The suggested solution is a coupled system of an active controller for the reduction of low frequency sound and a passive element for the shielding of high frequency sound.

Such coupled systems are known as active noise barriers but the conditions at an open air concert require necessary adaptations. The development of the broadband quiet zone system is divided into three parts which can be seen as a step-wise guide towards the fully coupled system, while each step provides insights in its own field of research.

These steps cover multichannel active noise control for outdoor concerts, a coupled broadband quiet zone system for outdoor concerts, and a model based virtual sensing technique with the goal to improve the performance of a quiet zone system in the actual quiet zone, beyond the control microphones. Multiple Quiet Zone Systems have been tested in-situ, based on pure active control and as coupled broadband system at different outdoor concerts as part of the Horizon2020 project MONICA.