It’s 3am and you’re wide awake. The cause? Your upstairs neighbours and their inexplicable fondness for stomping around their living room (and, if your hearing is correct, doing a spot of feng shui with their furniture) in the small hours.

If you’ve ever lived in a flat or a terraced house, you’ll know that the most annoying neighbours aren’t necessarily the ones who like to blast music on a Saturday night (although we’re not huge fans of them, as it happens). They’re the ones who manage to put you constantly on edge by regularly – but unpredictably – dropping heavy objects overhead, plodding around in apparently cement-filled shoes and scraping their furniture across the floor.

These noises are known as ‘impact sounds’ and a new study by the National Research Council of Canada has confirmed what we’ve long suspected: that these sounds are more “annoying” than any other noise-related nuisances and could even have an impact on our health.

Impact sounds are marked by the speed with which they arrive and then decay (that’s the technical term for sound fading away). They aren’t continuous, like the thud of a bass line or the buzz of a conversation: they thud, bang, crash and clang quickly and erratically.

In an article titled Noise from above: A summary of studies regarding the perceived annoyance due to impact sounds, researcher Markus Müller-Trapet explains how he and a team of researchers embarked on a study of just how irritating these sounds can be.

Participants sat in a fake living room and had to listen to various recordings of different sounds: some using different playback techniques, others using virtual reality.

Continuous noises like chatter or music were found to be less annoying, while the impact sounds, which included recordings of people walking barefoot and objects falling on the floor, were the most frustrating. 

The rise of working from home since the start of the pandemic is thought to have impacted levels of environmental noise, and Müller-Trapet found that “long-term exposure to such unwanted sounds may potentially lead to cardiovascular problems and sleep disturbance”.

Intrigued? You can take part in a survey to help the researchers with future studies (and yes, you can participate even if you don’t live in Canada) by imagining that you too are sitting in your living room and hearing sounds from above, then giving each one a rating of just how irritating it is. But if that sounds a little too close to the bone for your liking, ie a little too reminiscent of your neighbours’ inadvertent 3am wake-up calls, then we won’t judge. 

Images: Getty