HARD Summer Music Festival felt in Culver City

Many in Culver City heard the reverberation of sound waves last night from a festival more than five miles away.

Residents in Culver City wrote on several social media channels about the noise associated with the HARD Summer music festival around 9 p.m. Sunday. The festival was held on Saturday and Sunday at Hollywood Park in Inglewood directly adjacent to SoFi Stadium, yet a “pounding sound” was heard as far north as Culver City and Santa Monica.

Noise levels at the annual music festival have been controversial beyond this year. Officials from the city of Inglewood claimed that the implementation of noise reduction measures would help address concerns that led to more than 100 complaints against the event to the El Segundo Police Department last year.

However, posts on Culver City-related social media sites indicate that many people felt the impact in a city more than five miles from where the music was being played.

Posters express confusion over the sound and its origins, with one on Facebook describing it as a “pounding sound” and a thread on Ring describing it as “deep house music.”

Several informed commenters pointed out the origin as the HARD Summer music festival, a 2-day electronic dance music (EDM) and hip-hop festival that has attracted more than 100,000 attendees over the past several years.

A hotline was open during the event to field complaints about noise related to the festival. Inglewood Mayor James Butts told NBC LA that these complaints have gone down this year in part due to noise mitigation changes made by the city.

In response to last year’s complaints, the city of Inglewood banned stages at Sofi Stadium’s American Airlines Plaza, citing its elevation as a cause for the significant noise pollution.

Butts also championed changes to the placement of the stages and the direction and elevation of speakers as adjustments that would minimize noise propagation. However, those measures were insufficient to prevent a deep humming of bass sound waves from reaching Culver City and nearby cities multiple miles away from Inglewood.

“A warm air layer over cool air (temperature inversion) bends sound back toward the ground, making it possible for the low frequency to propagate all the way out here (I’m in Santa Monica),” one neighbor posted in response to the Ring post, “The amount of energy from speakers must be 110+db!”

“It sounds like it’s from a car that’s sitting in front of my house,” a member of the Culver City unofficial Facebook page posted regarding the noise. “The acoustics of this city are crazy!”