Ever After Music Festival receives a jump in noise complaints

The last day of the Ever After Music Festival caused quite the slew of noise complaints.

Gloria MacNeil, the City of Kitchener’s head of bylaw enforcement says, “We got final tally in last night and we had 97 [noise] complaints on the Sunday.”

Last year, the electronic music festival at Bingeman’s only had 7 noise complaints.

MacNeil says she was out at the festival Sunday night and recognized it was too loud.

“I can sympathize for the people that had to endure that, but moving forward we need to find a way that we can work with both sides of this and have a vibrant festival that isn’t impacting so many people,” she says.

MacNeil says the city is trying to determine what the cause of the issue was on Sunday night.

“There was quite low cloud coverage that day, wind speed and the direction of the wind were all contributing factors for Sunday’s complaints,” she says.

City of Kitchener Ward 1 Councillor Scott Davey says it’s strange because the exact same concert was going on every night of the weekend and there were no complaints made on the Saturday night.

“One of the prevailing theories is that weather really affects these things more than we realize,” he says.

He also says electronic dance music is heavy on the bass, which is a contributing factor as well.

“Base is very non-directional, so it doesn’t matter which way you aim speakers, the sound from bass will go in every direction,” he says.

Davey adds that some of complaints came from the other side of the

“In my specific location there was only about a 2 hour stretch in the whole weekend where I could hear [the concert] quite clearly.  Meanwhile, the ward next to mine somehow the sound traveled right over and people in the Chicopee area could hear it much more clearly than I could, even though they were farther away,” he says.

There are currently no plans to shut down the festival for next year.

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