Noisefilter (possibly literally?)

synecdoche — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:10:33 -0800

Is there anything we can do to keep our apartment a bit quieter? My girlfriend and I just moved into a new apartment, which we like very much. However, there is one problem: noise. We're on the top floor, but we can hear quite a bit of what our neighbour directly below us is up to.

I don't think he is (often) being excessively loud. For instance, right now, he's talking on the phone below me at what seems to be a reasonable volume, but I can still hear him and even, occasionally, make out the odd word. When his computer makes noise (such as when he gets an instant message on MSN) I know about it too. Things are a bit more frustrating when he listens to music. While there have been a couple of times when he has turned up the volume, for the most part it is, I think, fairly reasonable; it just seems as though the floor between our apartment and his is very, very thin. (I am not sure how much of what we do he can hear.)

I'm not sure what we can do. The floor is well-padded carpet through most of the apartment, though it is an older building. Most of the time he isn't really doing anything wrong, and it isn't as though we can ask him to not talk on the phone or ever listen to music.

Any tips on dealing with this? We're both grad students who do work at home, and would love things to be a bit better than "just tolerable." We're in Southern Ontario, if it matters. Thanks.

Songs of Silence

grateful — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:25:43 -0800

Shhh! A mixcd about silence... Looking for songs whose titles or lyrics prominently feature the word(s) "Shhh", "Quiet", "Hush", "Silence", "Whisper" and other similar concepts. May be willing to extend this to "Private" or "Secret" if it works. Pop/Rock/Alt from 50s to 00s, other genres considered.

I've already thought of Bowie's "China Girl", S&G's "Sounds of Silence", "Secret Agent Man" (as a maybe) and "A Kind of Hush" by ???.

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Noisefilter (possibly literally?)

Songs of Silence