I highly recommend this article to folks interested in the current noise ordinance issue:

Nobody could have imagined that seven days of intense public debate over the city's proposed new noise ordinance would end in five minutes of silence.

And yet it was pin-drop quiet at last Wednesday's public forum on said noise ordinance, when Assistant Police Chief James Fealy used his closing comments to announce that the city wouldn't be moving forward with what he admitted was a "half-baked" proposal.

"We need to slow it down and back it up," Fealy told a standing-room-only crowd of club owners and local music industry players, who had just spent an hour outlining for APD representatives how the ordinance would destroy their livelihoods. Had Fealy begun the meeting with that announcement, those same concert promoters could have shifted their stance from fear and unbridled anger to hope and talk of compromise 55 minutes earlier.

Austin Chronicle - Keeping the Peace