On a much less abrasively annoying scale, the walls and floors of the co-opish place where I live are extremely thin, and the extent to which the normally very nice people (well, most of them) I live with are often insensitive to this fact baffles me occasionally. It's always the same group of people that are loud though, so I suppose it's harder to realize how much the sound travels when you're always on the noise-making end of things. There are some people here, though, that I (and others) have actually asked repeatedly over the years to quiet down, since they don't quiet down on their own after ten minutes like everyone else.
They always apologize and are quiet for that evening and then a week later, at two in the morning, all over again they are talking so loud I think they must actually want me to get out of my bed, walk up the stairs, and join the conversation, blasting their alternately amazingly arcane or trendy music, running up and down stairs repeatedly to get exercise (!), conjuring up demons or the holy spirit or something in between with chants, etc. One of those statements was an exaggeration. You guess which one. My money's on "etc". So, it seems even when the message is directly expressed, it just doesn't go through. Or people just don't give a fuck. But I'd like to think more of them than that...I do have to live with them, after all.
Sometimes I'm tempted to randomly walk down the halls of the building at 4 am mooing, doing hare krishna dances, or yodeling or something, just to see if that makes people acknowledge the reality of our acoustic situation. Plus it would be fun for its own sake. But then again, I'm usually asleep at 4 am (hence the fact that it's me who gets woken up), I don't like loud noises even if I make them, and people who make loud noises tend to be sounder sleepers, I find (dirty-minded people: see unfortunately unfunny, unintended double entendre in that last statement). So I guess I'm doomed to cope. There are worse fates. But perhaps one day I'll snap...perhaps I should arm myself with duct tape and wave it around menacingly when someone's talking loudly at 4 am. Or get ear plugs. But that would be giving in to their will.
The one occasionally fun aspect of the acoustic poorness of this building was getting to monitor the sex lives of the people who live in the rooms above me, but they're not very innovative, I guess, so after the first few times it got easy to tune out and I'm not really even aware of it now. So much for free real-time noise porn.