In late January, a group of musicians, led by the trombone player Glen David Andrews, paraded through the narrow hallways of New Orleans’ City Hall and into the chamber of the City Council. They played snare drums and horns, cymbals and saxophones, trumpets and tubas. They danced. They sang a song called “Music Ain’t a Crime.” They held signs reading “we will be heard.”

Andrews and his fellow musicians were protesting a proposal that would re-imagine noise regulations for the city’s storied Bourbon Street. Sound in the area has been a matter of law since 1831, when the young city adopted an ordinance—one “concerning Inns, Boarding-houses, Coffee-houses, Billiards-houses, Taverns, Grog-shops, and other houses with the city of New-Orleans”—that forbade “cries, songs, noise or … disturbing … the peace and tranquility of the neighborhood.” THE ATLANTIC