Big Brick Organ (Other People’s Noise)
It’s three AM and I’m awake in bed. My neighbours are up too, it sounds like. I can hear them upstairs. There’s a THUMP right above my head and then smaller creaks like footsteps trailing to their copy of the door. This goes on for an hour. They creak back and forth across their place. They THUMP a couple more times. It’s easy to imagine someone walking around with a mug of tea and dropping books, but some sounds are tougher to visualize. At one point, four spots on my ceiling bang softly together in rhythm. Is it children? Trained dogs? Some boots attached to a pulley? The images spin into psychedelics and I’m falling asleep again. It doesn’t matter. I’m at peace.
Most people hate neighbour-sounds. Or at least enough that it’s a running joke. I can remember my uncle losing it at a Facebook video once where two actors were playing “your upstairs neighbours.” They were dropping bowling balls or weights or something on the floor. My girlfriend doesn’t tolerate that stuff either. At our last place, the electrician that lived downstairs used to blast Dropkick Murphys all day on the weekends. He had a sweet sound-system and our building was ancient, so you could tell the verses apart if you listened close. Ruth never went down, but she would be just slightly pissed off for as long as it was happening. She would pause in the middle of conversations and interject like “This music is so awful; I can’t believe he’s still doing this.”
I do get it, though. Noise is disruptive. My old roommate could never work at home because our landlord’s illegal AirBnB was right next to his room. Every day at 12, he would storm out and go to Starbucks mumbling about someone having sex or breaking up too loud. There’s also a personal element to it. It’s insulting to overhear your neighbours. This is my one-bedroom, not yours! I’m pouring half my paycheque into rent, bills, and tenant’s insurance and you’re telling me I still have to hear a stranger flush their toilet every two hours? Preposterous.
And maybe it is. But for me, there’s a small joy in neighbour-sounds — something transcendent in the bass that comes through my walls. I used to hear the person above me all the time at that place with the AirBNB. It was one of the first things I noticed. We would wake up around the same hour most days, and their alarm would buzz through the ceiling while I was getting dressed. They listened to Pink Floyd and Frank Ocean constantly, too. Just those two guys. It was weirdly intimate. I started internalizing their schedule over time, started to see it as part of my living space. Every day, I came home to my couch, my books, and my second-floor counterpart.
That’s an example, but it’s hard to put this sensation into words. I was describing it once to my girlfriend, and I remember she asked if it was about feeling less lonely. Aside from being vaguely anxiety-inducing, that’s also not the case. Somebody washing their dishes a floor away does nothing for me companionship-wise. More humanity is worse, honestly. Unmuffled voices may as well be car horns, and there’s nothing magical about hearing a neighbour you actually know.
The Pink Floyd listener started flooding my bathroom once. Every time they went to take a shower, water would pour down from our light fixture and get all over the place. The third time this happened, I had to run upstairs and say something. So, I ran, I knocked, and thirty seconds later I met a short, wet ginger man with massive arms. This was my neighbour. This man was the source of the rumbles and the music, the audio shadow I’d been following for months. And he looked like Conor McGregor. The whole rest of my lease, anything he did would bother me. There was no more anonymous pulse filling my corners. There was just Conor McGregor rolling off his mattress and doing air-bass to Money. Conor McGregor showering sans-curtain. It was awful.
So, it’s a specific kind of neighbour-sound that intrigues me. Maybe it would help to sketch some qualities. First, obviously, is the anonymity. You’ve just heard all about that. Second, is that the noise has to be at least a little bit muffled. Hearing every wet wrapper someone tossed or every piece of food they chewed would be too much intimacy. That would probably be reason to move. On the other hand, a round thump now and then, some house music with everything but the kick and bass rolled-off — that’s spectacular. Third, and this is a weird one, is that the sound should have a fleeting, private quality, like it’s not being made for other people. Do not call me a pervert here. I’m talking about things like footsteps or the news playing too loud. Mundane things. I have a neighbour now whose Outlook reminders I can hear from my living room. That’s what I mean. No one is intentionally cranking the volume on their email. Fourth, and last, is the time of day. This is more of a bonus quality. Any sound like the above will be doubly uncanny if it comes through at night, at like three or four in the morning.
Have you ever stayed in a big, gross hotel? They usually tick all four of these. I was at one called the Cantlie last time, and it was a goldmine. My bathroom was the best. All around the clock, you would hear other showers and sinks running through the walls. You could never tell exactly what it was or where it was coming from, and the noise had this distorted, wailing quality to it. It sounded like La Monte Young. I would get up in the night like I was hypnotized and just stand over the sink with my eyes closed.
And that’s what I need to get at next, this hypnosis. Why is it so easy to fall asleep to footsteps? What rhythm were Conor and I straddling for so long? Is it repressed hominid brain? Am I just a strange person? I’m sure that’s part of it, but there’s nuance here, too.
One answer is that neighbour-sounds are depersonalizing. In a positive way. Now, when it’s so easy to get lost in your head or the anxious vortexes on the internet, hearing someone stub their toe next-door can be grounding. It’s good for your perspective, like a zoom-out, or a cross section on your building. Tough angle for navel-gazing. Yes, you’re decompensating, but Unit 308 is vacuuming, and Unit 112 is playing Rock Band. Tapping into this deep enough is like a low-level out of body experience. You become part of a big brick organ, only hazily aware of itself. Another answer is that noise has haunting effect. Your apartment is a dead thing most of the time. The longer you live in one place, the more everything gets fused-together and familiar. Your fridge, your couch, Corner A, Corner B. It’s easy to feel half-awake at home. But good neighbours are like a poltergeist. A creak can peel the glaze off your eyes and draw your attention to places usually stuck in your peripheral. It can be unpredictable, too. If one spot doesn’t ping again, your floor might jolt, the kitchen might speak, keys might jingle behind your door. Life from the next realm over will always find a way to bleed into yours. Even the filmiest, most sedate cave-home is never completely still.
Am I endorsing loud neighbours then? Not really. Sometimes you should have a right to stone them. But I will always find a comfortable magic in the life around me. I don’t think I could live somewhere too far in the country, or with walls too thick even. My rushing water, my footsteps, my filtered media, would be too awkward to do without. My brain is built around other people’s noise. I don’t know how anyone could live off the grid. But who knows? Maybe one day, I will get tired of it. Maybe I’ll grow irritable or paranoid and everything I hear will be a terror. For now, I’m charmed.
