The Portola Music Festival, also referred to as Portola, is an annual

music festival A music festival is a festival, community event with music, performances of singing and instrument playing that is often presented with a theme such as musical genre (e.g., rock music, rock, blues, folk music, folk, jazz, classical music), nation ...

held at Pier 80 in

San Francisco, California San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. The festival made its debut in 2022. It is presented by Goldenvoice, the same company that promotes

Coachella Coachella (officially called the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and sometimes known as Coachella Festival) is an annual music festival, music and arts festival held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, in the Coachella Valle ...

. The event primarily features

electronic dance music Electronic dance music (EDM), also referred to as dance music or club music, is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres originally made for nightclubs, raves, and List of electronic dance music festivals, festivals. It is generally ...

. Limited to people over the age of 21, it is intended to "present electronic music in an adult way". The festival is named after the 1909 Portola Festival, an event thrown by the city of San Francisco to demonstrate its recovery from the 1906 earthquake.

Noise complaints

The event received noise complaints from residents of the city of Alameda which is located across the

San Francisco Bay San Francisco Bay (Chochenyo language, Chochenyo: 'ommu) is a large tidal estuary in the United States, U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the cities of San Francisco, California, San ...

from Pier 80. The city requested that the festival be discontinued or moved to a different location due to the various noise complaints from its residents. The highest sound level recorded by sound monitors located in Alameda was 61.4 dBA, which is below the city's noise ordinance of 70 dBA. However, the dBA scale,

A-weighting A-weighting is a form of frequency weighting and the most commonly used of a family of curves defined in the International standard IEC 61672:2003 and various national standards relating to the measurement of sound pressure level. A-weighti ...

, attenuates low frequency audio by as much as 40 decibels, implying the actual noise level at the lowest audio frequencies could have been as high as 101 decibels. The 2023 festival received 235 noise complaints and the 2024 festival received 224 noise complaints, despite mitigation efforts. The festival on Sunday went until 10:45 pm in 2024, compared with 11:00 pm in 2023.

Festival summary by year

References

2022 establishments in California Annual events in California Anschutz Corporation Electronic music festivals in the United States Music festivals established in 2022 Music festivals in California

External links

Portola Music Festival official website
{{Anschutz