The Portola Music Festival announced its coming back in late September, though not in a splashy social media announcement, but instead in a letter to Alameda residents who’ve been up in arms about the festival’s noise.

The Chronicle has the news today that the electronica/dance music-focused Portala Music Festival intends to return for a third year on September 28 and 29, which would again put it on Folsom Street Fair weekend. But there are no announcements of such on the Portola Festival’s website or its social media channels, nor any performers announced.

Instead, the announcement comes in the form of a letter to Alameda residents whose local government has been threatening to shut down the event over the volume of noise it creates. And the Chronicle’s report notes that Portola Festival organizer Goldenvoice is promising those residents they won’t be so loud this year.

"Portola is a two-day festival with special lineups each day," says the letter to residents from concert promoter Goldenvoice, who also organize Coachella. “This event is scheduled on Saturday, September 28th 1:00PM – 11:00PM and Sunday September 29th 1:00PM – 11:00PM, with all outdoor music on Sunday ending by 10:45PM.”

So that all sounds like they are quite confident this festival will happen.

"Understanding that sound was a factor that had an impact on the community, we will continue focusing a significant amount of energy and resources in creating better solutions this year," the letter continues. "We welcome and encourage feedback from the community as it helps us understand the positive and negative impacts from last year, which will allow us to continue doing what worked and develop solutions for what didn’t."

Goldenvoice is promising those Alameda residents a hotline to call with noise complaints, reduced volume, and altered stage placement that will hopefully lessen the amount of noise that cruises across the Bay. They’re also cutting off the outdoor music at 10:45 pm on Sunday, though that’s only 15 minutes earlier than previous years.

Yet it is not written in stone that the Portola Music Festival will happen on those dates this year. The festival has not yet been granted a permit from the SF Entertainment Commission, though the hearing for that permit is scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, April 16 at 5:30 pm, and will be broadcast on the SFGovTV website.  

Related: City of Alameda Now Wants Portola Music Festival Shut Down Forever After Second Year of Noise Complaints [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

It’s a humdinger of a problem for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District that the bridge still “sings” during high winds, but the transit agency won’t say about who’s fixing it or how.

The Golden Gate Bridge has been humming — literally humming, that is, crooning a sort of low-pitched whale song that’s audible from miles away — since last June, after the implementation of some structural changes intended to make the bridge safer during bouts of high winds. Those high winds returned this weekend, as did the humming, prompting the Chronicle to to check in with the engineers trying to eliminate the hum sound.

The Chron notes that “Folks as far away as Daly City can hear it.” Meanwhile Fox News, eager for an angle that depicts San Francisco as a Marxist hotbed of cancel culture, describes the story as “San Francisco residents want Golden Gate Bridge to shut up.”

What’s very curious here is that despite the very public nature of this structural anomaly, the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District transit organization that runs the bridge doesn’t want to say who’s working on the solution, nor when they expect it to be resolved. Your tax dollars at work!

“We’ll have more to say this summer,” district spokesperson Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz told the Chronicle. “It’s a tricky business. We want to be absolutely sure we get it right. We will never sacrifice the structural integrity of the bridge but we want to be responsive to our neighbors.’’

Engineers do at least know the exact cause of the unwelcome humming noise. Last year, the bridge got a retrofit wherein narrower slats were installed to the bridge's western sidewalk railing, which did have the intended effect of making the bridge safer and better able to withstand high winds. But it also has the unintended effect of high winds creating the hum, which was not anticipated, because the retrofit engineers tested their work on a smaller scale model. Now, for what the Chronicle calls the “retrofit of the retrofit,” they’re using full-size bridge parts in a wind tunnel, at some mysterious facility somewhere in the Canadian province of Ontario.

The Chronicle also notes that the previous retrofit last year cost $12 million, with no price tag yet available for the do-over retrofit. This money comes from your bridge toll fees, currently $8.70 for a non-FastTrak driver, and apparently slated to be hiked again later this summer. But right now, it’s the hum that’s really taking a toll on people who live anywhere near the bridge.

Related: Golden Gate Bridge Officials Say They Are Trying To Tone Down All That Wind-Caused 'Singing'

Image: Wa17gs via Wikimedia Commons

When real estate industry website Trulia set out to map the noisiest neighborhoods in San Francisco, they did so by pulling "about five years" of "police data on noise complaints," they say. But do calls to the San Francisco Police Department paint the full picture?

According to the site, SF's loudest/most apt to call the cops neighborhoods are the Tenderloin, the Upper Haight, the Mission, and North Beach. Here's their map that visualizes the data:

I'm not saying that their conclusions are incorrect! But calls to the cops presumably fail to account for persistent noise of things like traffic and construction, both things that can make an area unendurably loud (looking at you, some parts of SoMa). However, I've lived in the only-noisy-during-Outside-Lands-and-Bay-to Breakers Outer Sunset since 2004, so I'm a little out of the loudness loop. What do you think: Are Trulia's findings accurate, or did they miss a noisy nabe?

Related: What Does San Francisco Sound Like? Let The Sound City Project Tell You

Not only was BART's first (of two) weekend shutdown of the Transbay Tube not as bad as expected, but the transit agency claims that work done during that period has been great for riders' ears. But was it, really?

In a press release sent Thursday, BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said that "A tremendous amount of work was accomplished during the first shutdown," which riders endured August 1-2.

The agency has also "heard some good feedback from riders about how they have noticed a quieter ride," Trost said, pointing us to a couple positive tweets from riders as evidence of this, I guess?

Why might things sound better? According to BART's release, that's because during the last shutdown they replaced 6,500 feet of Transbay Tube rail, and ground 3 miles of rail "down in the tube on the East Bay bound track near the Embarcadero Station for a quieter ride."

Those two bits of work "resulted in reduction of a sound that has been compared to banshees, screech owls, or Doctor Who's TARDIS run amok."

(One might argue that since the TARDIS is a stolen vehicle, it's always running amok, but I'm a) not going to give BART shit for getting a little silly in a release and b) I feel like if I talk any more Doctor Who you guys will think I'm even more of a dork that you already do, if possible.)

Leave it to KPIX to rain on BART's positivity party, as they say that "BART riders who spoke to KPIX 5 on Thursday had differing experiences."

“Loud, loud as it was before,” said Joe Martins told KPIX.

And then there's Steve McLaren, who took BART from the East Bay to SF Thursday to catch the Giants game.

“Came through the tunnel and it’s the first time I ever heard all the screeching sound through there,” McLaren said.

“And I turned to [my wife] and I said ‘What’s going on here? Is this louder than normal?’”

Joe and Steve might not be impressed, but there's one person who's still happy: Gordon Hansen, of the "noticeably quieter" tweet.

The next BART transbay shutdown is scheduled for Labor Day weekend (September 5-7). Here's hoping that after that work's done, taking BART through the tunnel will be like floating on a soft cloud in heaven. KPIX report on how it actually is like being thrown on a bed of nails to come!

Previously: Weekend BART Closure Not The Disaster It Was Expected To Be

Dump your white noise machine! Ditch that "relaxing sounds of nature" app. After all, you are a Bay Area urbanite, and can do way better than that, with the Sound City Project's 18 different sounds of SF.

Ha ha, yeah, get it out of your system. "Is one of them a screaming homeless guy?" "Is one of them someone taking a crap in a SoMa alley?" "Is one of them a tech bro ruining San Francisco with banal conversation?" No, none of those (hey, maybe you should make your own! Email me if you do). The Sound City sounds are lovely and soothing and might, for just a moment, make you forget that we live in a place where people shit on the sidewalk either verbally or literally.

Creative folks David Vale, Rick van Mook and Caco Teixeira 3-D printed a custom "soundhead," to which they attached four Countryman omnidirectional mics and a Zoom H6 recorder (you can see how they did it here). Then they went to six international cities, at which they recorded the ambient sound of notable areas. They visited and recorded 18 places in SF, including Lombard Street, the Lands End Rocks, Alamo Square, and City Hall.

The sounds are surprisingly relaxing, exactly the kind of white noise someone who choses to live in a city might prefer over "babbling stream" or whatever that thing your grandma got you from Sharper Image puts out. You can check out all the sounds here, just click through the "Play" button until you get to the list of locations, then start listening away.

[h/t SF Egotist]

Our mother's grandmother was right: The Beatles are nothing but trouble. According to the Rincon Hill Neighborhood Association, tomorrow's Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park might prove too rock 'n' roll for Rincon Hill eardrums. So much so, in fact, they posted a hotline to call if the moptop turns it to 11.

While it should not affect Rincon Hill neighbors (the noise of the Bay Bridge would surely drown out noise from the ballpark), the SFPD phone number for sound complaints (too loud, rattling your home windows from afar kinda stuff) during tomorrow’s Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park is (415) 269-4134

However, if you're not dancing in the street during "Band On the Run," you're dead to us.

Who knew living in a city would be so noisy?

We received a few messages this morning regarding mass sleeplessness due to last night's Oracle Open World finale. Even the enchanting Stevie Nick's couldn't keep SF residents from calling the cops to ask what the hell was going on.

OK, I am going to try to sleep. I just can't believe . . . I live 3 miles away from the Cow Palace, and tonight Oracle is having their big "Appreciation Party" there. After closing Howard Street for two blocks downtown for an entire week ...tonight they have Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks & Mick Fleetwood (!), Lenny Kravitz, The Engish Beat, and The Smithereens in concert. It is so loud, you can hear it blasting all over The City, and I live 3 miles away from 'it'.

And according to the Chronicle, "apparently, the party was set up in tents outside the Cow Palace," which is why many SF residents could hear Billy Joel's wailing. But we're going to go ahead and blame Lenny Kravitz's set. His derivative music and rockstar persona is unsettling, can be felt near and far.