Dealing with a Boomy Neighbor
A long-time reader has a problem. It seems his neighbor
across the street is fond of cranking his stereo to the point where the subwoofed bass is
annoyingly loud in his home, and the offender tends to do this in the middle of the night.
"I've reported him to noise control for the city, but
it has been ineffectual," he writes. "All I hear is the thump, thump, murmur,
murmur, of the bass so it is very disturbing."
He's considered wrapping foam around his head to deaden the
noise, or using a white-noise generator, or even a radio jammer. "I found a book
listed on the Internet called Improvised Radio Jamming Techniques: Electronic Guerrilla
Warfare by Lawrence W. Myers," he says, "but I was frightened off by the
price."
Dealing with a noisy neighbor can be extremely difficult,
especially if he refuses to be reasonable. If he won't turn it down, it's hard to block
it. Foam, for example, is unlikely to work. It will absorb high frequencies effectively,
but these don't seem to be the problem. Ditto for fiberglass insulation. In both cases,
the long wavelengths of the bass will go right through the material.
Usually, the most effective way to deal with bass is mass.
If it were a neighbor on the other side of a communicating wall, for instance, adding a
couple of layers of drywall can be effective, although it's a pretty extreme solution.
It's not really practical on an outside wall, however, as the offending noise will likely
still come through windows and under the door.
There might be an electronic solution, but a radio jammer
isn't it. For one thing, if it worked at all, it would only do so if he were listening to
the radio; it would obviously have no effect on a CD player or tape deck. I couldn't swear
to it, but I suspect that such a device is illegal. Even if it weren’t, it would
cause lots of problems with other neighbors, as it's unlikely that it would affect only
one radio.
White noise might be an answer. This was a technique that
enjoyed some popularity years ago as a means of making noise levels tolerable in open-plan
offices. Relatively low volumes of white noise -- that hissing sound you hear between
stations on the FM dial -- was played through speakers in the office. Gradually, the human
listening apparatus would adjust its noise floor to get rid of the sound, a process called
"temporary threshold shift," thereby desensitizing the ear to all the ambient
sounds below a certain level. When you changed environments, the ear would readjust.
The trouble with the technique was that, while it worked
well for some, it drove other people nuts, and so it fell out of favor. But you can give
it a try by using your FM tuner, off station, to see whether it's effective and whether or
not you can stand it. Mostly you hear the higher frequencies in white noise, however, so
I'm not sure how well it would handle bass.
Another solution might be noise-canceling headphones, which
are primarily aimed at taming ambient bass sounds. These would probably be fine while you
were still up, but wouldn't be much use when you finally tried to go to sleep. For one
thing, sleeping with headphones can be uncomfortable; for another, these work by picking
up the sound using a microphone in each earpiece and reversing its phase, canceling the
unwanted sound. The moment you do anything to direct the sound from the phone itself back
to the microphone -- putting your hand over it is enough -- you get an excruciating scream
of feedback. I imagine putting your head down on the pillow would do the same thing.
Calling the cops was a good idea, though ineffective as it
turns out. Maybe your best bet would be to find out if your neighbor is renting, and who
the landlord is, and complain to him. In a lot of places, disturbing people who live
nearby is one of the few grounds for evicting a tenant. Even the threat of that would
probably get him to turn down the volume.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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