I am in the stupidest and most specific sensory hell

so, okay. refresher on context: my niece and her husband and their dog moved in, and so the living situation here is back to Absurdly Crowded, but like. we're managing.

but this house is a semi-open floor plan. the common area of the house is divided into a sunken living room in the front and a family room in the back, with a small dining area and galley-style kitchen separating them. no doors, walls only around the kitchen.

I am living in the front room, they are living in the back room.

I have curtains up on vertical tension rods to act as privacy screens. they do well enough for that, and for blocking light, but don't do much for noise.

during the day, that's... whatever. it's fine.

but at night.

you see, they play tv shows at very low volume as a sleep aid.

I am not against this. I CAN hear it, but it's very indistinct and I've gotten pretty good at tuning out the sound of muffled, unintelligible dialogue.

but in the last couple days, they've switched from whatever they were playing before.... to Friends.

The thing about Friends is that it has a laugh track.

There are two things about laugh tracks.

One, there's a very distinct cadence to them. They break up the dialog in a very noticeable way.

Two, they're heavy on higher-frequency sound waves.

So basically, no matter how quiet they play it, the laugh track might as well be custom designed to grab my attention against my will AND it's penetrating enough to get through the FUCKING EARPLUGS I'M WEARING.

WHICH ARE ALREADY THEIR OWN SENSORY ISSUE.

it's just hell. I live in hell. I can't wear headphones or earbuds in bed, the earplugs are already pushing what I can tolerate. at this point the only thing I can imagine will help is putting up some kind of foam walls around my room.

maybe a little bluetooth speaker to play brown noise on or something too, but I doubt it would drown out the laugh track on its own.

would it be feasible to ask them to change to something else?

yeah I'm going to talk to them later when we're all awake

I slept like three fucking hours and got woken up by the husband being loud on videogame voicechat

but I talked to niece about the thing and she agreed to change it so hopefully that portends better for sleep tonight

update: went to home depot with dad and we got some styrofoam panels to make faux walls out of and affix acoustic foam to

this will be of limited utility for the Daytime Loud issues but should be sufficient for blissful nighttime quiet