My studio felt different tonight. Usually, this room was my sanctuary—a place of control. I controlled the levels. I controlled the mix.
Now, the equipment felt like it was mocking me.
I sat in my ergonomic chair and woke up my computer. The screens flickered to life, bathing the room in cool blue light. I opened the project file from the night before: Neighbor_Noise_Complaint_Final.wav.
The waveform appeared on the screen—a jagged green mountain range of sound.
I put on my headphones. The Sony MDR-7506s clamped over my ears, creating a vacuum seal. The silence of the room vanished, replaced by the "noise floor" of the recording—the low, electric hum of the microphone itself.
I hit the spacebar.
Tap. Tap. Scrape.
I winced. It was louder than I remembered.
I grabbed the mouse. "Okay," I whispered. "Let’s see what you’re hiding."
I wasn't looking for the taps anymore. I knew what the taps were. I was looking for the space between the taps.
In audio engineering, silence is never actually silent. There’s always room tone. Air moving. Distant traffic. Or, if you’re unlucky, something closer.
I highlighted a section of the audio between two of the loud thuds. On the screen, it looked like a flat line. Silence.
I added a plugin called a Compressor. Basically, it squashes the loud sounds and boosts the quiet ones. I cranked the "Make-up Gain" knob all the way to +20dB.
The flat line on the screen became fuzzy. The background noise roared up like a jet engine.
Hhhhhhh.
Static. White noise. The hum of my refrigerator in the other room.
I added an EQ filter to cut out the low rumble and the high hiss, focusing entirely on the mid-range frequencies—the range where human speech sits.
I closed my eyes and leaned in, pressing the ear cups tighter against my head.
Tap. (Explosively loud due to the gain boost).
Then... nothing.
Wait.
I rewound three seconds. I played it again.
Tap... [silence]... [rustle]... Tap.
There. A rustle. Like fabric brushing against wood.
My heart began to hammer against my ribs. I looped that two-second section. Over and over.
Rustle. Rustle. Rustle.
It wasn't a mouse. Mice scurry; they make a skritch-skritch sound. This was softer. Heavier. It sounded like denim dragging over rough lumber.
I isolated another section, further down the timeline, right before I had stopped recording.
I cranked the volume until it was bordering on painful.
Hhh-uhhh.
I froze. My hand let go of the mouse.
It was faint, buried under layers of electronic hiss, but it was undeniable.
Hhh-uhhh.
Breathing.
It was wet. Thick. The sound of air passing through a throat clogged with phlegm or dust.
And it was close.
I looked at my boom arm. The microphone had been positioned about two inches from my wall. For the microphone to pick up breathing that clearly through a layer of drywall, the source had to be pressed right up against the other side.
Someone had been standing inside the wall, face pressed against the plaster, listening to me record them.
I ripped the headphones off and threw them onto the desk. The sudden silence of the room crashed down on me.
"Jesus," I hissed, spinning my chair around to face the room.
The air in the apartment felt suddenly very thin. I felt exposed. My eyes darted to the corners of the room, the shadows under the desk, the closet door.
You’re safe, I told myself. You have a deadbolt. You have a chain.
But the breathing wasn't outside. It was inside the structure.
I looked at the shared wall again. The vintage poster hung innocently.
Scritch.
I jumped, my knee banging hard against the underside of the desk.
The sound hadn't come from the wall this time.
It came from above.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.