Blog1 min read
Music for an apartment with thin walls
You can hear the neighbours; they can hear you. The constraint turns out to be a teacher.
An apartment with thin walls changes how music gets chosen. You can hear the neighbours; they can hear you. The music has to be the kind of sound you'd be okay with someone hearing through a wall, both for their sake and yours.
This restricts the room more than you'd expect. The sleep room mostly lives at low frequencies and shouldn't bleed at all — drones turn into a hum through plaster. The wellness room sometimes does the same. Lo-fi, reading-room music, and the lighter end of the focus room come through walls better, because they live in a frequency range that doesn't carry as far.
Bass is the main culprit. A track that sounds modest in your own room is the kick-drum thumping the neighbours have learnt to live with. Headphones solve the problem entirely, but most people don't want to wear headphones at home for hours. The compromise is choosing tracks whose low end is already quiet at the source.
There's an unexpected benefit. Music chosen this way often ages better than music chosen for a room with no walls. The constraint forces a kind of taste — light on the bottom end, careful with the dynamics — that turns out to be useful in any room. The thin walls were a teacher.