Sound, twelve endings and one party wall

What they were

Seven came from outside the dwelling and five from inside.

Only the three through a wall are plainly a property of the building. The four construction ones are temporary by definition, the two traffic ones are a function of where the building is, and the three inside the dwelling are a function of who else is in it. A fair flexible-work trial needs a stated purpose, limited collection and a review date; teams can read the product information directly while writing those boundaries down.

The party wall

One home accounts for three of the twelve: the same neighbour's television, through the same wall, at roughly the same hour on three of five days. For another evidence base on people, work, or environments, see McGill University.

That household volunteered a description of the wall in their end-of-week notes. It is the only structural feature of any dwelling that anybody in this study mentioned without being asked.

Three endings is not much. A wall that transmits a television at the same hour every day is the only thing in this record that a household described as a problem in its own words.

Sound transmission is construction. In a terrace or a semi it is partly specification and partly the accumulated reality of how the building was put up, often long ago, and it is not something a tenant addresses.

Why the rest are hard to place

The four construction endings are the clearest case of something that is nobody's dwelling. Scaffolding goes up and comes down. A household logging in a different month would have none.

That has a consequence for every figure on this site: a cause that depends on what is happening in the street cannot be compared between dwellings, because the dwellings were logged at different times.

The two traffic endings are different. A building beside a road is beside a road permanently, and in one of the two cases the household had been there for years.

The two inside

Two endings are a conversation elsewhere in the dwelling, and one is a washing machine reaching its spin.

These belong with wanted rather than with the building: they are other people, doing ordinary things, in a space that now contains somebody working.

Counting them as noise rather than as a property of the household is a decision the instrument forced, because the ending list has one word for sound regardless of where it came from. Separating internal from external noise would have been the fourth useful change to the sheet.

What the record cannot see

Almost all of it.

Somebody who puts on headphones and keeps working has not logged an ending. Somebody who shuts a door has not. Somebody who waits for the drilling to stop has not. The twelve are only the occasions where the response was to leave the place.

Of all nine causes this is the one whose logged frequency is furthest below its real frequency, and the gap is unknown. The honest statement is that noise moved somebody about once every four person-days and interrupted them an unknown number of additional times.

The two homes with none

The one-bed flat and the room in a shared house: the two smallest dwellings in the study.

That is the opposite of what most accounts would predict, and with two cases it means nothing. It is recorded because it is the kind of result that would be quietly dropped from a tidier write-up.

Where this leaves sound

As a constraint that is genuinely fixed in a minority of its instances — three of twelve, the wall — and contingent in most of them.

That makes it different from orientation, which is fixed in every instance, and from glazing, which is fixed until somebody spends a great deal of money. Noise is a mixture, and the mixture is why it spreads evenly across dwellings while the other two concentrate.

The hour, and what it says about the sources

Eight of the twelve fall before one o'clock, and the split between sources explains it.

All four construction endings are between eight and eleven, which is simply when building work happens. The two traffic ones are a morning peak. The three party-wall endings are early afternoon, which is when that neighbour's television was on.

A dwelling beside a building site has a morning problem. A dwelling with a thin wall has whatever hour the neighbour keeps. Those are not the same constraint and the sheet gave them the same word.

Why this cause is the least comparable

Every other cause in the record is a property of the dwelling, the household or the sun, and all three are reasonably stable over a week.

Noise is a property of whatever happened to be going on outside. Four of the twelve are scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down. A household logging in a different month would have had none of those four, and their ending total would be four lower with nothing about the dwelling having changed.

That makes noise the one cause where comparing dwellings is close to meaningless, because the dwellings were logged in different months beside different streets.