Empirically measurable problems
Published on 2024-08-02
The last place I lived... well it wasn't literally a frat house, but my friends and I liked to joke it was, and I think there was a lot of truth to it. I lived in the basement of a frat house.
It wasn't exactly a good deal for a number of reasons; it was more or less what my partner and I were able to find in the cut throat housing market at the time. We were desperate, we saw an opportunity, and we took it without asking too many questions. The landlords didn't tell us it was a frat house, unsurprisingly; they didn't tell us a lot of things. They didn't tell us a year earlier the upstairs tenants held a massive party that got shut down by the police. And, most importantly for today's article, they didn't tell me that the developers didn't insulate the interior walls. They didn't tell me that until about a month after I'd already moved in, and by that point, I had learned the hard way.
I don't really dislike the people who lived above me, in the sense that I don't like to think I "dislike" anyone. They were somewhere along the chain of cause and effect of a lot of physiological problems I had while living there, and I think that's what I want to talk about: my experience, irrespective of them.
They liked listening to music a lot. Early 2010s electronic pop and house music, as well as most of the other top 40 hits from the era. I Love It by Icona Pop and Summer by Calvin Harris are two that stood out to me as being popular among them. Within a few months, I had a deeply intimate knowledge of what they liked to listen to, because I could hear all of it, all the time. The only time I couldn't hear music coming from their side of the house was on weekdays during working hours. They listened to their music pretty late into the night—or at least, late for me; clearly not late for them. Usually, somewhere between 10 and 10:30 PM, the music would go quiet, and that'd be the last of it. We tried talking to them about it a few times, and whenever we did they'd turn down their music a little bit, but it'd be back the next day. It always came back.
We didn't really have a good solution. We didn't know each other, had very little in common. I never really got to know them, which honestly was a bit sad; I'd like to have a positive relationship with all my neighbours, but they were inevitably just the people who played 2010s house music in my walls. With nothing else to do, we sucked it up and started wearing earplugs.
Until, one day, that wasn't enough. Maybe because we were putting up less resistance, they started playing their music louder, and later into the night. A few nights I could hear them well past midnight, with the record being 2 AM. While the earplugs mostly dulled the sound of the music, it didn't stop it from vibrating my bed frame, which, in time. grew intolerable.
Having tried and failed to reach out to them so many times, our friends started putting us up for the night every once in a while. I'm endlessly grateful to them for all the times they rescued us in the middle of the night. I'll grant that there was probably more diplomacy we could have done, but they were a fairly large group of men, older than us, and they regularly had quite a few friends over. It was intimidating, to say the least, to have to constantly be their party-pooper. Especially considering that they had already, repeatedly shown us that they didn't care about our needs.
It's really hard to explain that feeling, because in the end, that's all it is: a feeling. Maybe you've felt something similar in your life, but you've never felt this feeling, because it's mine. But I'll try to, anyway. First, open this video:
"you're in a bathroom at a summer night party" (redirect.invidious.io)
Plug in your headphones, hit play, and gradually turn up the volume. You might notice that you feel comfortable turning up the volume a lot higher than you would for any of the original recordings of these songs. After a while, though, you'll start to feel it. A bit further and you'll probably start to literally feel your headphones shaking a bit.
It's like, not exactly safe to listen to music like this for a long time, and it's almost certainly not good for your headphones, so you're probably going to want to stop now. I find my brain doesn't immediately respond to these frequencies being played loudly in the same way it would for any other recording. It's deceptive, but it will still hurt you. Now, the music I had to listen to through my walls probably wasn't loud enough to give me hearing damage, and that's something the earplugs helped with quite a bit. What did affect me, however, was the deeply disorientating feeling of being vibrated by everything I touched as I tried to fall asleep. Wearing the earplugs like this seemed to make it worse, so I'd take them out, and then all I was left able to do was to stare at the ceiling, powerless. Not only was it infuriating (which, in turn, made it even harder to sleep), but it was sickening, if for nothing else, because it was inescapable. It was everywhere I went. Blocking my ears wouldn't stop the vibration that seemed to come from within my body itself, and it's not like I could just stop feeling.
I tried to share this feeling in the only way I knew how at the time. I decided to open the voice recorder app on my phone and hold it to the ceiling. I recorded about a minute of Summer by Calvin Harris as heard through the wall, and when I went to sit down and listen to my recording… I couldn't hear anything. It was almost completely silent. Of course, most of what I was hearing were lower frequencies, which my phone's microphone clearly isn't very good at picking up. There was something really disturbing to how quiet the recording was. It meant that this was truly something you'd only understand if you were there. There would be no evidence it'd ever happened.
One day, I stuffed the last of my belongings into three suit cases, put my keys on the table, closed the door behind me, and never walked into that house again. I dragged my suit cases thirty minutes down a steep slope in the blistering heat to the bus exchange, hopped on board and rode another twenty minutes to my new neighbourhood, never to return.
I still have those recordings on my phone. I come across them every once in a while as I'm digging through old files. I'm always a little surprised; they don't sound like much at first. I mean, they sound like nothing. You wouldn't know what they were supposed to be. But if you listen close enough, you can still hear them upstairs.
I used to really like The Chainsmokers, forever ago. I always had a soft spot for electronic pop music. Not so much anymore.
Part of what makes this story kind of hard to talk about is the fact that "noisy neighbours" isn't exactly a novel problem. If they'd just walked downstairs and let out a blood curdling scream outside my window, the effect would have been more or less the same, but I probably would have felt a lot more heard when talking about it. Lots of people have had problems with noisy neighbours, which, in a sense, did make talking about it a lot easier, but at the same time, it makes talking about how I spent all this time living on my friends' couch feel more… overkill? I feel like I'm gaslighting myself a bit, like, surely it couldn't have been that bad. But, I have no way to prove it—not even to myself. I suspect that if my neighbours knew the number of days I didn't feel safe coming home, they'd think I was being silly. But if they understood why—if they felt what I had felt for a night—they'd have turned down their music, and they never would have turned it back up.
There are some problems that can't be quantified. There's some things that can only be made "true" by trusting the subjective experiences of others. And quite often, those are the ones that matter the most.
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