Field Testing
Sound is a rapid variation in air pressure. Human hearing has a fairly narrow range of tones or frequencies that it can detect but the range of sound pressures, its “dynamic range”, it can handle with out damage is enourmous, from a quiet whisper to a Symphony orchestra close up. This range is a sound power ratio of over one billion. Such large ratios and are often handled best on a logarithmic scale instead of dealing with nine or ten decimal place arthmetic. In addition, humans have, on average, a response to different tones that is not uniform, so a “weighting” is usally applied to sound level data to take this into account. As a result, pickleball sound is usually measured in decibels above an identified low reference level using the “A” weighting curve, resulting in readings taken in “A” weighted decibels or “dBA”. A typical quiet library is normally at about 40 dBA and human speech is usually at about 65 dBA. Pickleball at distances less than 100 feet can exceed the 65 dBA level.
Pickleball Sound Labs and PSM Consulting can sometimes arrange to do on site measurements of sound levels but this task can also be accomplished by clients using calibrated measurement equipment or by contract acoustics engineers.
There are several important factors when doing field tests:
1. Background noise levels need to be mesured. Courts near a highway do not usually need to be quieter than periods of low traffic noise.
2. Most towns have some kind of “noise ordinance” which can vary tremoudously from one community to another. An ordinace may or may not specify a permitted sound level or a metric defining how levels are to be measured.
3. Accuracy is important and phone apps are generally of little use since the metric employed by the phone may not be defined and the phone microphone level is not calibrated.
4. Measurements, data and compliance with an ordinance will not insure a particular sound level is tolerable by the residents near pickleball courts.
5. The players who happen to be playing at a given set of courts, and the gear those players are using, may or may not represent the ball hitting power and the gear used by other frequent players at the same courts.
PSL and PSM Consulting can be consulted about arranging field tests. Refer to the pages called Field Test Gear for more information.
