I have always been fussy about noise. I don’t mind overhearing people talking, but I recoil from other instruments in the disgusting opera of everyday life: open-mouthed chewing, rhythmic sniffing or coughing, phone alerts, pen-clicking, nail-clipping.
For a long time, I was able to tune these sounds out, or politely remove myself from situations where they were bothering me. But during lockdown, my ambient fussiness grew to a fixation. The problem was that there was nowhere to politely remove myself to. The woman who lived above me in our quadplex also rented the garages below to run a business making minimalist metal wall hangings, a task that involved a fair amount of what sounded like welding. The unpredictability and pitch of the noises made them impossible to ignore. The floor that separated me from my neighbor’s workshop was completely uninsulated, and the wail of her equipment felt like a personal test. She, perhaps more so than the virus itself, became the locus of my pandemic stress.
Fortunately, there were plenty of noise-canceling solutions to pick from. Whenever I sat down to work, I would put on my Jabra headphones and fire up an app called Noisli, which allows users to create layered soundscapes. (I paid $10 a month to use the app during all my waking hours, and because I coveted the paywalled desert cicada option.) Over that I played music on Spotify, swaddling myself in a curated cacophony. I kept my headphones on all day, thrilled by the control I had over my environment. I had always envied people who seemed unbothered by noises—they probably don’t drunk-text their exes either, or eat beyond capacity—and now I was one of them.
That was just the beginning. The craftswoman moved out; my devices stayed. I bought a loud air purifier and put it on the left side of my bed. I then put a LectroFan white noise machine on the right side. With the ceiling fan on, I slept surrounded by sound on all sides. The sensation was akin to sleeping in a dryer, encircled by womb-like whirring. Noise-canceling devices had proliferated and taken over my home. They had even entered my person, in the form of the special narrow earplugs I bought for my dainty ear canals. I obtained a small portable white noise machine meant for babies and toted it around my apartment like a daemon. I would place it next to my tea while I ate my breakfast and fire it up when garbage collectors came, when my new upstairs neighbor—this one a penitent law student, mercifully—was clip-clopping around, and when the leaf blower at the church across the street started a-blowing. I was safe. I was smug.
Then human error abruptly forced me from my sound cocoon. Packing in a hurry for a work trip to Albuquerque this past spring, I forgot my baby white noise machine, my little ear plugs, the ear buds I exercise with, and the charger for my noise-canceling headphones, which crapped out midway through the flight. I bought new earplugs at the airport upon arrival, but they were incompatible with my tight canals. I didn’t sleep well that night or the next, nor on the plane home.
It wasn’t so much actual noises that kept me up as the expectation of noises. I had leaned into noise-canceling tools under the banner of reducing distraction, which I understood to be the enemy of productivity and well-being. But though my devices had been effectively masking noise, they hadn’t made me any better equipped to stay calm and focused when noises intruded. Because these tools are so effective, it’s easy to treat them as panaceas rather than spot treatments. Once I realized I had overdone it, I had to correct not just a habit but a lifestyle.
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