Those darn kids with their rock music and inverted incidence!

The recent folding of legendary guitar maker Fernandes makes it seem like the days of loud stadium rock are behind us. Rarely do you see bands boasting to be the loudest on Earth these days, and a lot of the more popular guitarists stick to crowd-pleasing ballads as opposed to ear-blasting shredding.

Even Japan’s Mrs. Green Apple, who have been tearing up the charts with their poppy brand of rock music, aren’t who I’d expect to blow people away with assaults of sonic waves. But perhaps I was too quick to judge them because a recent show in Yokohama proved they can dial it up to 11 at times, albeit with a little help.

▼ It’s no Guitar Wolf, but they got some chops.

On 26 and 27 July, Mrs. Green Apple held back-to-back shows at Yokohama Yamashita Pier. However, the sound from both shows was said to disturb people as far as 15 kilometers (9 miles) away in neighboring Kawasaki City. Bear in mind, it’s not just that people could hear them out there, it’s that it was so loud there that people complained about it.

According to NHK, there were about 50 official complaints about the sound. Meanwhile, on social media, scores of posts were made about the noise, including one from Kawasaki that actually provided audio evidence. It’s mainly the very low sounds of the bass that carried over so far, so you may need speakers with good enough low-end range to hear them and how surprisingly loud they are.

In response, Mrs. Green Apple issued an apology saying that they were very careful to check the sound levels before the shows, but due to unexpected wind conditions, they could be heard at farther distances than anticipated.

Several experts also weighed in on what happened to concur with the band’s explanation. When planning the show, the speakers were directed out to sea to minimize the sound disturbance to everyone on land. Of course, residual sound will travel in all directions, but with the right planning, it will mostly travel upwards and dissipate into the sky.

But under certain conditions, winds carrying the layers of warm and cool air in the sky can create conduits for the especially hearty low wavelengths of sound to bounce off of and travel a lot farther than expected. What’s especially interesting about that is that rather than a straight line, the sound travels more in an arc, like a missile that rains down rock & roll on the residents of Kawasaki, while people in between them and the venue might not even hear much of it.

▼ In these simulations, run by a seismologist at Osaka Kyoiku University, you can see pockets with little to no sound near the concert. The left image shows the sound propagation with no wind, and the right shows it with the wind conditions during the shows.

A different but similar phenomenon can be noticed on snowy days. The snow on the ground and falling snow dampen the sound all around you, so everything is almost eerily quiet, and yet you can also hear the sounds of passing cars from far away surprisingly clearly. That’s because those distant sounds are not coming straight at you, but traveling more in an arc through the sky and coming down at you due to temperature differences in the air above.

So, Mrs. Green Apple probably can’t call themselves the loudest band on Earth after all this, but it’s nice for them to know that mother nature is on their side and sending their music to people far and wide.

Source: Mrs. Green Apple, NHK, Hachima Kiko 1, 2, 3
Featured image: YouTube/Mrs. Green Apple
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