The driving bass beat of the Breakaway Music Festival could be felt and heard as much as five miles north of Fair Park on April 11 and 12.
DALLAS — The noise that traveled several miles from a music festival at Fair Park last month is still reverberating at Dallas City Hall, where Monday, more than three weeks later, leaders of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Department said they will try redirecting that noise to keep it from happening again.
The EDM – electronic dance music – of the Breakaway Music Festival on the weekend of April 10-11 rattled windows and irritated eardrums as far as Abrams and Northwest Highway. Members of the Dallas City Council were flooded with phone and email complaints from the neighborhoods of Lakewood and Lower Greenville.
The thumping bass beat reverberated up until the 11 p.m. curfew as much as five miles away.
“I even heard it too,” said councilmember Paula Blackmon. “I think if it had been a more subdued type music, people probably would have enjoyed it.”
“So we were notified of the issue Saturday morning,” said Brett Wulke, Assistant Director of Dallas Parks and Recreation Department, about the first complaints that arrived the morning of April 11. At a Monday morning meeting of the Parks, Trails, and the Environment Committee, he explained the causes and proposed solutions of their now three-week inquiry.
“I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on it,” he said of the weather conditions that weekend. “But moisture in the air, low cloud coverage really can help, it gives a bouncing effect.” Climate reports from that weekend show Dallas was partly cloudy with 60% sky coverage on April 10th and 80% coverage on April 11th.
The stage positioning for the festival held in the parking lots 12A and 12B was due north, directly toward Lakewood and Lower Greenville, as it had been in the 2025 version of the festival, which did not receive the same flurry of complaints. In their presentation to the PTE committee, Parks and Rec said “the fact remains it (the stage) faces surface parking lots with no structures to mitigate sound travel” and that reflective surfaces can amplify sound.
In the future, they say stages in that location will no longer back up to the Midway and face outward. Instead, the stage will be positioned with speakers facing the interior of Fair Park, where the Coliseum and Cotton Bowl can mitigate sound travel.
They also said future complaints or concerns can be directed to the Fair Park Command Center, where an additional line might be added. That number is 214.421.8850.
Councilman Adam Bazaldua, whose district includes Fair Park, recorded his own video outside the concert on Saturday, April 11. His video shows that the sound from the concert on S. Fitzhugh Ave., south and east of the venue, was minimal.
“We have this first-world problem, and we rattled a bunch of million-dollar houses’ windows,” Bazaldua said of the complaints that rattled his nerves for another reason. He was among those on the city council who fielded phone calls and email complaints about the concert in the district he represents. He says he wishes bigger problems like crime and poverty near Fair Park got this same kind of attention.
“It’s frustrating for me to see so much of a prioritization and a rush to address the issue of some noise that happened to travel, and it was an anomaly of an event, versus that same fire under the ass of city staff to do something for the residents who live adjacent to the fairgrounds,” Bazaldua told WFAA.
He would love it if Dallas residents made more noise for that.
Meanwhile, as a result of the noise complaints from April, Wulke also told the PTE committee that Fair Park will require decibel readings during similar events, notify code enforcement of each music event to be held at Fair Park, and “utilize Code’s Nighttime Entertainment Team at music events for added accountability measures.”