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Everything Is Getting Louder

theatlantic.com

251–260 of 316 posts

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#251
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the ambience apps. It's doing this, but very customizable!

On the other hand, a memory card won't start skipping at 10PM when the kids downstairs start playing with their $10 aliexpress quadcopter that barfs theoretically highly illegal quantities of RF all over 2.4GHz. Ditto for $2 aliexpress chargers and their gaggle of $20 whitelabeled progeny on amazon.

Fair. I haven't faced that oddly specific situation :).

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#252
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you deal with it? Are there any federal rules / regulations currently in the pipeline to help such sufferers? Do other countries - perhaps Scandinavian - have standardized noise norms that you cannot exceed or are they pretty much non-existent everywhere?

As a fellow misophonia enthusiast (it’s not an officially recognised condition) — noise cancelling headphones and music are the only way I can survive office environments. A pinch of stoicism and deep breaths helps when stuff gets through. For me the worst trigger sounds are eating noises and crinkly food wrappers. Trying to open a crinkly wrapper quietly makes it worse. The misophonia gets worse when I’m otherwise s…

loud road noises have made it hard to go to sleep. white noise generators (well, brown) using cheap $5 earbuds has helped immensely. I have Bose qc-20 for daytime stuff, but you can't sleep with them very long - they'll break, and it's very expensive to replace. The $5 earbuds don't last forever, but I often get 2-3 months out of a pair.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#253
post #155

I slept for about 18 months in a second-story room overlooking one of the busier streets in town. That'll never happen again. Motorcycles were especially obnoxious; I usually sleep like the dead, including all the way through an energetic northern California earthquake, but we had a regular that would rip up and down the street sometime after 1 a.m. and it often interrupted my sleep. Also -- and this hasn't previousl…

similar situation for me currently but i manage to survive using a white noise machine. I also leave the fan on in the summer for the noise. I wonder if I would feel better if i transitioned to a quiet sleeping environment. i've thought many times about how loud motorcycles are even legal, especially at late hours. I even see ebikes that are just as loud which is absolutely insane to me. The worst part was when my do…

I agree on motorcycles, but have read that the loudness is at least partially a safety thing for them, as other car drivers won't notice them without some sound.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was given a used battery mower. Really hated it. Super heavy and the torque would just die if I got to any particularly high grass area. Naturally the cable everywhere sucks but if you have a smaller lawn it's probably worth it. You eventually master the cable lasso rodeo.

Do you remember what voltage it was? I've got a 56V Ego mower—at the time I got it that was the highest voltage available, although it may have ticked up in the past few years. Makes a big difference. It's close to indistinguishable from a gas mower as far as power, and doesn't feel particularly heavy either.

40v. Good to know the better ones do actually work better. Thanks.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#256

I found this article's style infuriatingly slow. If it had been a quarter or a third of the length I think it would have been much stronger. It took quite a while to figure out what the hell was going on. And then you get to things like this halfway through: > Thallikar took his campaign to his homeowners’ association and to his neighbors. The response was tepid, though he did persuade one person to email the city. W…

Agreed, needed editing though I fully sympathize with the people in the author's story. The drug shithole I used to live in after prison was crackheads screaming for hours after blowing up pipes in their face when a rain drop hits it after they heat it up, crackheads getting robbed and fighting all night, shootings, constant ambulance and firetruck sirens for fentanyl ODs, my neighbours door being kicked in by a drug…

What’s a drug collector? Or is that a typo. I just want to know what one is if there is a such a thing.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#257

If your acoustic environment is driving you nuts, you may want to speak to an audiologist and/or ENT. There is a condition called hyperacusis[1] worth asking about. If everyday noise is debilitating or anxiety-inducing for and it doesn't seem like others are affected to the degree you are, it wouldn't hurt to speak to a hearing specialist. The causes and treatments of this (spectrum?) condition aren't entirely agreed…

Thank you very much for pointing that out!

I'm not sure why it never occurred to me that mine could be a medical condition, and all this time I have been quietly hating myself for being extremely intolerant of others while the condition gets worse.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#258

For me the trigger is TVs. I've been renting a flat in a poorer area for over a year now. The walls are a lot thinner than in other places. There are a lot of people today (mostly 50+ year-olds) who cannot fall to sleep without the TV on. My neighbor is one of them. And the thing with TVs is that the most irritating sound frequency they emit is the one that is barely audible when you're in the same room, but when you…

Could also be an issue with speaker placement. Most flat panel TVs have a speaker pointing down or backwards at the wall due to small bezel flat screen design.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What decibel meter are you using to get those readings? Seems insane that the loudest restaurant is equivalent to a jet engine taking off.

small, busy restaurants without sound deadening can be really loud, but I doubt it's actually 90dB. that's like the opening band at a small music venue.

It’s a real phenomenon. Most restaurants aren’t quite that high but there are a surprisingly large amount that are.

I’m the cofounder of an app that crowd sources noise levels at bars and restaurants. You may find it useful.

It’s called SoundPrint.

Re: Everything Is Getting Louder

#260
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of this and have a hard time believing it but I’m curious. What causes “low frequency sound” for you? And why do you think other people can’t hear it? At low frequencies tones degrade into individual pulses but can still be heard/felt. Noise-cancelling headphones actually work best with low frequencies like train and plane noise... do those help you? Googling “VLF” only gives results about radio wa…

i’m not going to post the same reply twice, but if you would read my reply to a sibling post you’ll see what i’m talking about.

Thanks, and someone else posted [1] so now I could look for more info on it!

I'm now extremely curious -- what do noise-cancelling headphones do for you? You can see here [2] that Bose's QC35's reduce the lowest frequencies (down to 20 Hz) by between 10 and 30 dB -- and the Wikipedia link suggests that the Hum is in the range of 32-80 Hz, so is certainly covered.

If they make a difference, that could indicate that you truly do have a kind of extreme sensitivity there, while if they don't, it could be another (real but non-auditory) phenomenon that your ear/brain is interpreting as sound, e.g. tinnitus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

[2] https://www.rtings.com/headphones/1-2/graph#565/2090

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