Dear Brian,
I need your help. The guys in the room next to mine play music and loud video games all through the night. I simply can’t fall asleep! What should I do?
– Dan Edwards
Hey, Dan, thanks for the excellent q-stion. I’m gonna go ahead and get right to answering it with sentences. The first thing to do when you find yourself dealing with a noisy neighbor is to ask yourself, Do I really understand what it means to be “noisy?”
As we all know, noisiness is the vibration of “sound particles” in the air.
Noises are made when an object emits an electrical current from its “focal node.” This current then excites the particles and teaches them which way to move.
Now, I know how you’d probably respond: this “electricity” theory of sound might make sense for amplifiers or speakers, which have wires and are extremely electric, but it doesn’t make sense for noises made by people, who are made of people-meat and not electric current!
Well, on the contrary, people are actually very made of electricity, and we do make noises by sending currents from our brains (which are the “batteries” of the person) to our tongues, which send them out into the air.
To make sense of the noise, our ears “look” at how the sound particles are arranged and use that picture to make up an appropriate-sounding noise in one’s head.
This means that it’s never really true to say that someone is being noisy, because it’s actually the “air” that’s being noisy. Further, when you’re overhearing the noise your neighbors make, you’re actually listening to the noisy air in your room, which you are ultimately responsible for.
So, in a sense, you’re the real problem.
Now that we understand whose fault it is, we can get to work on resolving the issue.
Do you really need to use your room at night? I rarely even spend time in mine; most of my nights are spent drinking dates and going on beers with women.
It’s a wide, wide world, and there’s a lot of things you could be getting up to, Dan. I mean, if you choose to spend your nights all alone in your room, aren’t you asking the air to be noisy?
Hopefully this cleared things up for you, “Dan.” Maybe next week you could ask for advice about something that isn’t entirely your fault.
