My apartment is on the first floor in the back of the building so close to an open-air subway train that I could jump onto the top of a passing train without much trouble. It rattles by and honks at workers on the tracks at all hours. It took me about a week to tune this out, and now I look forward to it at night, as it drowns out other noises.
heavy footfalls (we call my upstairs neighbor “heels” as her signature move is to have all her friends over from 6am-8am on Sunday mornings to get ready for church. Step one is apparently put on clunky heels and move furniture) really set me on edge, I feel like they trigger my fight or flight instinct, as if there might be an intruder in the house. Sudden thumping and tumbling noises are similar. Somehow, these aren’t nearly as bad from next-door as they are from above. Music or the bassy rumbling of dialogue on a TV hooked up to a sound system are also hard to ignore. My brain has trouble ignoring human-made noises.
My wife grew up in cheaply built apartments in NYC and isn’t bothered nearly as much as me by it all. I’m from the woods of Maine. That could have something to do with it.
My upstairs neighbor likes to move furniture constantly. I don’t know why or for what purpose, but i have to put up with heavy furniture being dragged, heavy objects being dropped, and loud heel walking. I can tune it out just fine 90% of the time but some days it just pisses me off. I’ve never confronted them about it though… not good at that sort of thing.
It’s still better than some upstairs neighbors i had during college who would vacuum really late at night. Sometimes past midnight. It pissed me off so much.
If the upstairs neighbors are being that loud and ignoring all complaints, no matter how polite — I’ve been there and yes, it happens — they deserve what they got.
I had unbelievable noise troubles in urban apartments when I was young. My neighbors were mostly trust-fund kids slumming it, they had no need to work or sleep. They came to party and that was the end of the discussion. Nothing could stop it, especially not local law enforcement.
Ironically, I had a cheap home studio set up in my bedroom. In there, I had the tools to make the whole neighborhood sorry I lived there – along with an understanding, gained by personal experience, of what sort of sound frequencies were the most penetrating. Once, I lost my head and broadcast a dub record at jet-engine take off volume, but I usually stayed quiet.
Eventually, I realized that I was the problem and got the hell out of there. I recommend everyone do the same if at all possible. Noise wars are as pointless as any other form of warfare.
I suppose this is further evidence that it’s easier and more profitable to someone, to increase entropy than to try to decrease it. China is having it’s own experience of late stage capitalism.
Mad Magazine in vented this in the early sixties. One of their articles was a “newsletter” for the Swampview Terrace Arms" apartment complex and in it was a fake ad for something very much like this for dealing with noisy upstairs neighbors instead of the traditional banging on your ceiling with a broom handle…
I once lived under someone who was either bowling or having office chair races in the hallway of their unit. Never did figure out which but it was godawful. Also lived in an early 70’s apartment built so shoddily in terms of any sort of insulation that I could hear my downstairs neighbor snoring.
In summer, you could almost cook things by laying them against the west-facing walls in the bedrooms,(It was open country all the way to the horizon, the area still being developed had a drive in movie theatre to the west) there was no detectable insulation. And the place was moderately upscale, not a welfare project by any means.
He’s lucky it wasn’t in sync with the buildings frequency.
"Earthquake Machine
“In 1898, Tesla claimed he had built and deployed a small oscillating device that, when attached to his office and operating, nearly shook down the building and everything around it,” says Shea Gunther at Revmodo. The device weighed just a few pounds, but Tesla was able to tune the timing of the oscillator at such a frequency that each little vibration added just a little more energy to the wave of flex in the building. “Given enough little pushes, even the largest structure could be shaken apart.” Realizing the potential terrors such a device could create, “Tesla said he took a hammer to the oscillator to disable it, instructing his employees to claim ignorance to the cause of the tremors if asked.”"
