Recently, a Californian piano teacher got the scare of her life when her upstairs neighbor, a 39-year-old heavily intoxicated woman, shot her through the floor. Boom!
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
The piano lamp took the hit, and later the police found a second bullet that had made its way towards the piano player, without hitting her. It seems that the printer had been complaining about the noise of the piano since her arrival last year.
I immediately thought of a couple of professional musician friends who also suffered the anger of an upstairs neighbor – fortunately unarmed – after moving into their condominium.
They had nevertheless taken the lead, informed the co-owner of their profession, of the need to work on their instruments, among other things to prepare for important auditions. They invited her to let them know if there was a problem.
The flautist friend: “When we met her, we asked questions. She told us: “It’s fine, I like it”.
After the auditions, they took two weeks of vacation, and it was when they got back that everything changed.
A first email appalled them. Basically: “Immediately stop playing your instruments, I have the right to my calm”. No negotiation was possible, mediation was refused.
The couple undertook the soundproofing of the room used as a studio, guided by a firm specializing in the insulation of professional studios, taking photos, documenting each step.
Two weeks after the end of the work, a new hostile email claimed that it had “almost nothing changed” and summoned them to stop all instrumental practice.
The flautist summarizes the rest: “Tension, anxiety, insomnia… we put together a file, contacted a lawyer. We kept a precise calendar of our practice, the schedule, the duration. We even measured with a sound level meter, taking turns filming the measurement while the other was practicing! »
The complaints continued, culminating in an ultimatum: “You stop practicing, or we go to court.” »
Reassured by their solid case, the musicians ended up answering: “Sue us! They received a nonsense email to which they did not reply, then… nothing.
“We left her the last word, I think that’s what she wanted. »
For the moment, the truce continues, but these friends think back with a little nostalgia to the owner of their former home, a subscriber to the Orchester Métropolitain, always delighted to hear them, and sad to lose them as tenants.
The noise pollution is extremely difficult to describe. When a municipal regulation speaks of “noise likely to disturb the peace, comfort and well-being of the neighborhood”, it remains subjective: the path that leads from delight to nervous breakdown is very mysterious…
When we want to quantify the nuisance, we suddenly switch to the opposite extreme: the regulations of cities like Montreal or Quebec go from the principles of good neighborliness to a science that is difficult to access. Broadly speaking, we will try to precisely measure the “emergence” of noise pollution: by how many decibels does your neighbor’s violin exceed the ambient noise picked up at the place where it disturbs you?
But I don’t know many violinists capable of situating their sound in relation to this equation found in the Montreal rules: “Lx = Bx-Ba+(Bp-Bm) for Lx ≥ 0”.
A clue ? Bm represents “the minimum noise of the source at the perturbed place”. How a clue can leave you perplexed…
Some instruments sometimes use a mute, which attenuates the sound and gives it a particular color: composers ask for it for certain specific passages. “Here is the solution! you say to yourself? Not quite. Yes, a musician can at times work with a mute, decipher and learn difficult passages, for example. But at a high level, sound control is a mainstay of all instrumental work.
I also found some crazy suggestions on a French site: surround the flute with insulating foam, or slip it into a cardboard box, leaving only its head protruding and creating holes for the hands to slip into. But again, nothing viable for a professional musician.
So what ? Practicing an instrument will always be risky?
Of all the French and American articles on the subject, I retain two things:
— If a neighborhood dispute ends up in court, case law will be decisive. That is to say, what has already been considered reasonable or not, in terms of schedule, duration or sound volume. In France, for example, case law shows that a duration of instrumental practice of one hour per day must be tolerated. Beyond that, it’s less clear.
— We always emphasize the importance of good communication: take the lead, explain the situation, negotiate the times and duration of rehearsals, encourage dialogue. In short, everything my friends had done.
Afterwards, it will therefore be necessary to hope that the neighbor is not in too changeable a mood… or intoxicated with tequila and armed with two guns.