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.