Another thing you can do is be a ‘creepy neighbor’ and watch them play.
filmore, I’ve talked to the neighbors behind me. They also have young kids, so the noise doesn’t disturb them.
But they do say these people are the noisiest on the block. 
The girl on the other side is woken by them in the
mornings, too. Unfortunately, the ordinance allows noise at 7 am.
kanicbird, I was just thinking of doing that today! LOL. I have to stand on a chair to see them, but that
would be so funny. 
I hope I don’t get yelled at for necromancing a thread, but there’s not a ton of discussion about such a situation.
@Newtosite – did you find a solution to the basketball sounds keeping you up? i am desperate for help after two months on top of existing sleep issues.
I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this!
I’m afraid my solution isn’t going to help you:
I moved into a different bedroom on the other side of my house,
and the neighbors eventually moved away.
I essentially have PTSD from it; I can’t tolerate the sound of a basketball
anywhere now.
Oh, I’m sorry to hear you are traumatized by it, but I completely understand! Ty so much for responding to this 
Wow. I’ve wondered about this thread off and on.
PTSD is a horrible outcome. I’m glad the neighbors moved, tho’.
Thank you TiredAF and Beck for your kind words. I hope your
situation improves somehow, Tired.
To those with the sound physics knowledge- would those windows with shades between the panes be of any help?
I’m guessing so?
Example:
The between pane blinds glazing will help, but not because of the blind.
Sound is really difficult to manage, as it can get in though the slightest opening, and the huge range of wavelengths involved make things harder.
Double glazing helps, but there is a tension between double glazing for heat and double glazing for sound. Heat control requires that the panes be close enough together to prevent convention cells from forming, which means closer than say 1cm. Panes this close couple sound reasonably well, and don’t work well for sound insulation. A wider gap reduces the coupling, and placing a blind between the panes forces this. One notes that the company linked to above can supply a triple glazed unit that addresses both sound and heat.
The down side, apart from cost, is that you can’t open the windows. Even if the windows can be opened, opening them even a crack obviates the sound proofing. Sound will cheerfully propagate through even tiny openings.
Windows constructed from laminated panes also helps with sound, as they form a constrained layer damped panel - which reduces sound transmission. Not as good as a well spaced double glazing, but still good. Standard 3mm float glass is, by itself, pretty lousy at stopping sound. Indeed at lower frequencies it is close to transparent.
In a bedroom, the other thing to do is to provide lots of damping to stop the sound from reverberating about. A huge fraction of the sound we hear in a space is reverberant. Culling this can make a significant difference. So lots of soft surfaces, and soft furnishings. Wall hangings can help lots.
Have you considered what variety stores used to drive off loitering teenagers?
Music they hate! Hymns maybe! Country music? Maybe something on repeat? An endless loop?
Maybe they’ll show up saying, ‘Hey, can you turn that off? It’s very annoying!’, and you get to say, ‘…so is the endless bouncing and screaming! Let’s make a deal!’
Good Luck!
Interesting.
But the … diffraction … dispersal? … of the sound waves by the softer material at a variety of angles within that space would do little to reduce its effective transmission across the gap. Not what I would have intuitively guessed.
Thanks.
In general there are three things surfaces do to sound: adsorb, diffuse, and reflect.
Soft furnishings are mostly going to adsorb. Which is what we are going for. However the range of wavelengths we need to deal with is pretty large, and the effectiveness does vary with frequency. Long wavelengths are particularly hard to adsorb without special measures.
Diffusion isn’t something one worries about unless you are striving for a high quality listening environment where a flat response of diffuse sound is the goal.
Sound mostly gets absorbed due to friction of the moving air against objects. Porous materials with large effective surface areas make for good adsorption. The fibres in the fabric and filling provide the high surface area. That they work against moving air is important. Air is stationary at a boundary. Spacing absorbers from surfaces makes a difference. Hence wall hangings - hung with a gap behind them.
A bed is a good absorber, so is a fabric covered sofa. Carpet helps, but because it is on the floor its effectiveness is reduced and it only really helps at high frequencies.
No material is perfect and depending on the wavelength you will always get a mix of adsorption and reflection. Reflection from many different objects scrambling the sound produces a diffuse sound field. However if you want to control the diffuse field well it takes significant effort and specific design of elements.
I replaced the picture window in my living room in my old house with triple-glazed, for the heat benefit. I found it made a HUGE difference in noise - so much quieter, I no longer heard the cars going by on the street.
Replacing the one window probably is not a horrible expense and has those extra benefis for heating or A/C.
To reinforce this point, there is a hugh difference in the bathroom’s echo factor when I take all the towels out of the master bathroom to wash them.
I feel the pain of the OP from five years back as well as our new guest!
And I can totally understand PTSD from this. There is something about intrusive rude neighborhood noise that overrides all attempts to just let it go.
Though I have no answer for you, please allow me to ramble a little about my own painful noise situation and the joyous resolution.
A few years back both sets of neighbors to either side of me moved out and new families moved in. The crazy thing is, both houses now have people who have similar loud parties in the summer–they both set up DJ equipment and leave super loud music with a monotonous pounding beat going from noon to midnight or until the police show up.
Thankfully they each only have one or two parties like this throughout the summer, but the absolute rudeness gets under my skin. Bose noise-canceling headphones work as do AirPods Pro, totally neutralizing the noise, but I still seethe at the lack of consideration.
The remainder of the summer months I deal with crazy loud boom cars stopping at the traffic light near my house, all hours of the day.
Last summer I must have been thinking about this a lot because one night I had a neat dream about a secret office hidden in my basement, away from all sounds. I awoke and had that “awwwww…it was just a dream…darn!” feeling. But over the next several days the thought came back over and over. “Hmmm… I wonder if…”
I went down and measured the open areas of the side of the basement where the laundry is, seeing what would happen if I could convince my wife to get rid of 25 years of junk and remove the built-in wooden shelving that the former owner installed. Wow, it looked like there was about 8 feet in one direction and 10 feet in the other direction.
Fast forward to today: My wife heartily approved, so over the summer we disposed of tons of crap. I tore out 20 feet of floor-to-ceiling 2-foot-deep shelving, sawed it up and got rid of it. I put up a few of those wire shelves that restaurants use in the back to store supplies. Then we worked out a new floor plan for all of the remaining stuff in the basement.
My contractor friend started work on my new hidden room in November and was done in a couple of weeks.
Now I have a super cool 8x10 foot basement office, with nice wood floor, commercial-grade lighting and suspended ceiling, a big TV on one wall, a small couch from Ikea that opens into a twin bed if I want, and a really nice simple desk with my computer on it.
The crowning touch was to place two 1x4 foot LED panel lights horizontally at the top of the rear wall, with their light set to 5600k (cool white): they look just like basement windows on an overcast day and make the place look superb.
I did invest in interlinked smoke detectors for my whole house with one in the office in case disaster strikes during a siesta.
I don’t hear any sound from the outside! Looking forward to “party season”… Bring it!
This reminds me of a time when my best friend’s Dad was besides himself due to the noise his rear neighbor’s kids made in their swimming pool. The yards were separated by 10 foot tall bushes. He asked them to keep it down to no avail. next time the kids started their screaming in the pool, my friend’s Dad fully gassed up his old lawn mower, started it up and parked it next to the bushes. After a couple more “noise incidents” the screaming magically stopped.
Very good!
I’ve found 300W (RMS) of amplifier power through a 15" speaker plus a smaller horn/tweeter playing hours and hours of chainsaw and other assorted construction equipment noises to be very effective.
That or a marine air horn, blasted at every offense.
Unfortunately, for uncontrolled beasts, like dogs, I have not found very high pitched sound generators to be effective at all. However, in those situations, I find it productive to mimic the deviant owner’s ruckus, and find it surprisingly easy to match the timbre of the owner’s voice, even through a pedestrian microphone and PA speaker.
Both solutions require the righteous person to wear hearing protection, but it is worth it. Somehow.
Hey, I’m cool. I love a big bunch of loud music. Not real particular what genre, except maybe no rap. Not my thing. Little hip hop is ok.
But every adult has been annoyed by the shit noise at the wrong time. Every one of us.
I don’t like the loud tunes at a shop I’d love to shop at more. It’s distracting. Just the wrong time and place.
There’s a grocery here that has a loop of 50s tunes. A tad too loud but mostly it’s the bad cover artists. Like you couldn’t afford the originals at least? Jeez, how cheap is your corporate office? And the repeat they’re on. I swear I hear Deadmans Curve Everytime I walk in.
I love the sound of kids playing in the yard. Til they start fighting. But my adult kids fight like cats and dogs playing Cornhole. It’s the nature of group games, I guess.
Basketballs bouncing is an all together different sound. So annoying. I don’t know how b-ball players have any hearing left. Plus squeaking sneakers. I’d lose my mind if I had to hear that like a coach does everyday.
To hear it while trying to sleep has got to be the worst.
I bet there’s neighborhoods that don’t allow goals at houses.
HOAs have got to be allover it. To me it’s that annoying. It not like the loud car passing by. You hear that and it leaves. B-ball bouncing just never ends.
Aaackkk. Just thinking of it drives me crazy.
People don’t let your kids to that to the neighbors.
I would love to see this on YouTube.