Development of a novel sound pressure level requirement for characterizing noise disturbances from theater and opera stages

The noise generated by stage machinery should not be perceived during the scenic performance. The noise limits from tender documents and other authors are discussed. Furthermore, the sound pressure level during the stage performance with filled auditoria in various theaters throughout Germany was measured. The measurement setup is based on the the requirements within the tender documents. The background noise level due to the listeners and other sources can mask the machinery noise. To extract the background noise, two different methods are applied, i.e. the minimum one-second-average and the Gaussian mixture model based method. The results are discussed and compared. Utilizing these measurements, novel sound pressure level requirements can be derived.