I’m having trouble finding a noise canceler for sale, which I assumed would be available in some form. I’ve seen them put next to noisy industrial machines, and I thought there would be something for sale. There is something called Sonos, but it seems to never have gone past the design stage.
Is there anything that attempts to actually put out an inverse wave of what its microphone has heard (not headphones).
Also, do y’all have noise masking machine recommendations? This dog next door is actually kind or ruining my life at night, and I’ve already gotten on bad terms with the owner, who thinks she needs protecting with a giant dog outside literally all the time, never indoors, which barks at pretty much anything that moves. I may have to move to another neighborhood just to get real sleep.
Does anyone have experience with blocking the window? I have an idea to prop up plywood in the window opening to trap the sound with something solid
We have a white noise machine and use either a fan or the AC to get even more white noise going. On a recent trip I used a free white noise app on my Fire tablet that ran for 8 hours.
Active noise cancellation is hard, because it’s difficult to calibrate the microphone and speaker to work in tandem.
Passive noise cancellation mostly works. It consists of two things:
[ul]
[li]White noise generation[/li][li]Sound-dampening materials[/li][/ul]
For my white noise generator, I use an air filter. Makes plenty of noise, fades into background perception after a while, and, as an added bonus, filters and cycles the air.
Sound-dampening is difficult, especially with windows. Double-pane windows help, but are pricey to install. In my estimation, windows in a bedroom are a mistake, and should be bricked (or plastered) over - but then, I’m incredibly sensitive to light when I’m trying to sleep.
If you don’t own the house, then adding additional insulation or plastering over the windows isn’t really an option. In that case, you can add quilted curtains, wall blankets, or even just quilts or blankets, to soften the “blow” of the sound - the last thing you want is for the sound to be reflected, since the angle of reflection is unpredictable. You could even get the free-standing acoustic screen used in workshops.
A warning: heavy-duty acoustic curtains are heavy and expensive. If you want to go full out, prepare to pay.
My mother-in-law has always owned dogs (often two or three at a time). 20 years or so ago, she had a particular barky duo, and she once came home from a day trip to find a ticket stuck in her front door, from the village police department, for violating the noise ordinance. It seems that the dogs had been barking all day (in the house, but unsupervised, of course, because there was no one home other than the dogs), and after a few hours of that, one of her neighbors called the police to complain.
I use a white noise generator (with something like seven different sounds) that came with my clock radio. It works really well. I have to have white noise to sleep.
Some places I’ve lived that type of noise complaint has been the cops domain. Especially if you’re talking about problems in the middle of the night. Animal control people are at home in bed then.
I’m an apartment in a big city, with people coming and going, an echochamber of a courtyard, and trains one alley away that run all night. Plus pets that like to run around in the middle of the night and groom themselves within earshot (slurp, slurp OMIGODSTOPIT). I’d go insane without white noise running while I sleep. I burned a CD with an hour long track from a music service and play it on repeat. I tried a stand-alone little machine but it wasn’t loud enough. I sleep very well.
Calling the police is really the only way to solve the noise problem, but it’s sure not going to make the neighbor like you any more than she already does.
Dogs are a serious problem. Neighbors effectively have no rights. The police will not help you; they will send you to animal control. If people are having loud parties or any other human made noise, cops will cite people. Not for animals.
Animal control, in my experience, is grossly understaffed and the people there lack the intimidation quality of police. They will leave a note for the owner, but you need to be on it. When we had this problem, we were told that our only recourse was to sue, and that to do that, we would need at least one other neighbor to sign on. Nobody wants to do that and incur the hostility of an already hostile dog owner. If the owner is really malicious, they can take pleasure in your misery knowing you can’t do much.
As far as the noise is concerned, there is no good news there either. The sharp random quality of a barking dog is hard to bear. Soundproofing is very difficult. Plywood will not work; it will act as a passive speaker. If you have bad windows, new double pane windows with noise reducing glass can help, especially for higher frequencies. Lower frequencies are MUCH harder to filter.
You will really come to hate the owner, and even more hate a legal setup where such individuals can actually ruin people’s lives and the system won’t help you.
As someone said earlier, it really does depend on your area. I called animal control in Los Angeles (and only had to call once!) and my problem was solved. Of course it helped that none of the dogs were licensed and the owner got a big fine.
Active noise cancellation is as noted above - really hard. You can’t just use a microphone and emit a cancelling sound. The problem is that the wavelengths are mostly too small - and whilst you can cancel out the sound right next to the microphone with a lot of effort, one you move only a small distance the phase of the sound has shifted, and what was once a cancelling sound is now actually reinforcing the sound. The middle of the important audible frequencies is about 1kHz. That has a wavelength of about a foot. So a distance of size inches means you have moved 180 degrees in phase, and your cancellation has become reinforcement. It is worse than this even. Most of the sound you are hearing in a room is reflected of the various surfaces. Only some is directly reaching your ears via the window. So you have a three dimensional space with sound bouncing every which way, and no useful way to handle this. Your sound cancellation machine’s output will be bouncing off the walls as well, so you have no useful way of controlling what its output is doing either.
The only successful sound cancellation has been for machines that have a highly predictable sound signature where you can reason ahead of time exactly what sound they will emit, or where you cancel the sound in a very small controlled space - ie inside headphones.
But, since a lot of the sound you hear is actually reflected within your room, dampening the reflections in the room can actually help. Soft furnishings, thick curtains, all the way up to speciality sound absorber panels. Bookshelves full of books also help.
But handling the psychological shock of a dog suddenly letting loose in the small hours is not easy to manage. There are things we are wired to react too.