During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
Yeah, one house I lived at would get these random silent vibrations that would rattle plates on shelves for about 15 to 20 secs.
Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
Used to get a similar thing in my flat; because Thameswater are absolute shit and need to be bought out already, there had been a water leak near/under the road next to me for some time.
Apparently it leaked to much water into the ground nearby that shocks were transmissible. Whenever a heavy lorry/truck drove along that road late at night, it would shake the building a little and rattle plates in the same way.
When they finally fixed it (after the road got beautifully resurfaced by the council, then dug up 3 days later by...Thameswater) presumably the water fell down into the water table and we've not had any shaking since.
Back when industrial hammers and drop forges were still common in the US (so like 70yr ago now) it wasn't uncommon for people say 10mi away to not feel them but 20mi away to feel them due to the magic of resonances and whatnot.
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem
It was explained to me that this phenomenon is a product of the noise wavelength matching up with the distance between houses. When you stand between the houses, you are near a null point and may hear nothing at all. But the wall of your house will be acting like a giant speaker diaphragm.
I have been to concerts where if you stood in one part of the venue certain bass notes would turn music into a jumble.
However—since you mention getting out of your (presumably otherwise quiet?) house onto the street—I also encountered a phenomenon in which presence of subtle other noise (which in your case could be tree leaves rustling and so on, and in my case was a literal white noise machine) make a sound that in a completely quiet room would drive me insane significantly less of a problem. This is not to say “it is all in your head” because, well, how you perceive it is what matters at the end of the day.
Hopefully your bass player neighbour could understand and use headphones or practice at a different time.
I mean, on the flip side every semi truck that rides the jake brakes down the hill near me is basically playing the anthem of low rents and the accompanying clientele.
I'm certainly not the only one in my neighborhood who would go postal if I had to live in a "quite" neighborhood where people complain about the noise each other's landscaping services make and call the cops when parties run late.
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
Train at 5 miles is nothing. Can confirm.
There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine.
Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction.
Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
The engine would have been significantly less noisy than a diesel locomotive. It's almost eerie how quiet they can be, given how big they are.
The pump it drove could have been loud, though.
If the train is moving at the right speed the carriages will hit any bump in the track at a frequency that resonates.
You get the same effect over a smaller area with vibratory compactors used in construction. Get the frequency just right and the whole neighborhood can feel it.
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
I can hear the start-up of 777 engines at the airport, every night at approx. the same time. The airport is 12 km from my apartment and there's a hill in between. But my bedroom is facing the airport side and the wind mostly comes from that direction. It's crazy.
Something similar happened in more modern times with a cell tower, although it's over a decade ago now: https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-t...
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
And power lines. I seem to recall reading that some of the health problems may have come from Agent Orange, which was used to clear the power corridor in the 50s
For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience.
Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree.
This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/
The study's author is a well-known esoteric loonie. You are better of not trusting that study. Context in German: https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Cornelia_Waldmann-Selsam
Interesting, thanks for context. Then, was this particular paper not peer reviewed or did it use suspect methodology?
Peer review doesn't guarantee much of anything, unfortunately.
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
They definitely should not own one of these then: https://somasynths.com/ether/. But it is lots of fun for me.
I met a new age architecture consultant (not an actual architect) back in the 90s that was convinced his bag of Epsom salts and a copper spring was protecting him from the cancer causing electromagnetic fields produced by house wiring.
The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped.
While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken.
https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-m...
The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)
What's funny is that you can make a defensible argument that COVID caused 5G.
(Basically, everyone was even more chronically online during the lockdowns, so there was extra money to be made and extra urgency in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure.)
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.
Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.
And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
> Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!
> Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
Sadly the memories of having worked with the machines persists
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