Music as Torture

Loud music played 24 hours a day can have a detrimental impact on a person’s mind and body.  Your body can’t rest – your mind is being bombarded.  It’s like being tortured.  Some torture does involve the captive being bombarded with loud music 24 hours a day.  This non stop music from the Neighbour from hell is the same thing. 

Music has been used in psychological operations. The term music torture is sometimes used by critics of the practice of playing loud music incessantly to prisoners or people besieged. Torture using Music

For US interrogators seeking to disorientate and break Iraqi prisoners it's 'torture lite' - rock music played at excruciating volumes. But while the song choices may sometimes verge on the unintentionally funny, this appropriation of music by the military is anything but a joke.
US using music as torture

Studies have shown that missing a night's sleep temporarily drains 10 points from a person's IQ. Consistent sleep deprivation, through harassment, exposure to bright lights, and exposure to loud, jarring music and recordings, can drastically impair judgment.
American torture methods

Added to that, is a lot of houses these days are not built to repel this kind of incessant loud noise.  Fibro walls, small yards, close houses, unit blocks – all this makes and causes problems

In our case, (because my partner suffers from a constant daily headache), in this situation (with the neighbours from hell), it became impossible.  We simply couldn’t continue to live in our house – the way it was.  We investigated many options, including moving, but in the end we decided on a number of changes we could make that might make a difference.

First, we soundproofed our house as much as possible.  In our case, we chose to do this downstairs as it was already partly brick, which is a good insulation against noise. 

 

After it was finished, we then basically moved downstairs.  We had a small kitchen, a toilet and a lounge.  This worked well for a while, but when summer came we found it was just too hot. 

We simply didn’t have the money to install another air conditioner downstairs, so we had no choice but to return upstairs.  We shut the house up and put the air conditioner on.  That blocked the noise, but caused another problem – money.  The cost of running the air conditioner 24 hours a day was too much for us.  We needed to find an alternative.

We then purchased a noisy air cooler to mask some of the noise.  We purchased headphones for our television.  We still had to shut windows and doors – which wasn’t ideal but it worked.   We had to leave the television on to use the headphones – but this was cheaper than leaving the air conditioner on.

 At night, we would shut the bedroom up and put the air conditioner on.  Sleep was hard to find, but we had to try somehow.   We lived like this every day for months –until the cooler weather came back.  Then we went back downstairs.