Can you help yourself cope by covering up nerve-shredding external noise with other noise?
No, absolutely not. It just adds sound. And in fact the more complex a sound is the worse the effect. So 3x low volume
pleasant sounds all happening at once drains the battery faster than one
louder unpleasant one.
Its sound
itself for me, not the
type, I mean sure some types of sound do hurt more, i think although it seems like this is to do with resonance perhaps? Echo? So i can tolerate much louder & more complex sound outdoors, than i can in a room with lots of bounce back off the walls & ceiling
- So someone talking loudly outside is
infinitely less painful and battery braining than it would be in, say a supermarket, or a hospital ward with zero carpets/furnishings to dampen it. Oh my, the thought of that makes my whole body hurt.
The 'tinny' sounds of a cymbal that go on, are worse than a drum for example, unless the bass drum is loud/low enough to make it register in my chest. Worst ever is a bass guitar or keyboard playing low sounds with the 'repeater' pedals engaged (think thats what theyre called when they extend the note, if not, you know what i mean) Or perhaps its called reverb? i dont know. Oh my that is torture when every note carries on while the next note is played i feel sick just thinking about it.
However the issue isnt with the sound being 'nerve shredding' per se, its the same effect with wonderful, beautiful, favourite sound. Some sounds
are nerve shredding though, of course for everyone there are sounds that one hates - eg fingernails down a blackboard or, ugh, balloons! Organ music! And so i imagine the drain on the battery is slightly more because there is an emotional component especially if its someone else inflicting it.
I have always had problems (pre ME - since childhood) with not being able to tune out irrelevant sound - like background music etc, & inability to concentrate unless in silence, but that manifested in ways such as having to turn the radio off when driving in areas i dont know or on large busy roundabouts for example. Or finding it utterly exhausting having to listen to music i hated in the shop where i once worked i noticed id feel massively less stressed & fatigued after a day where the boss was out & i got to decide which & how much music was played. I'd often just turn it off.
I'd get veerrryy stressed & wound up if i had to perform a really tricky task like cashing up (pre computers) the till, while there was music on that i hated & could not tune out. But thats about not being able to concentrate because of distraction - it'd be just the same if someone was talking to me.
Now its utterly impossible to concentrate while there is any sensory input at all, even my favourite things
But this is all not to be taken for sure as being neuro-typical though, since a few people in my life think i
am autistic. (2 ASD people themselves and an ex occupational therapist think i am high masking, but thats another story).
but regardless, the thing is that pre ME i found it hard to
cope with unwanted sound, especially if i had no control over it, but that was about stress levels, anguish, irritation, yes fatigue but only because i found it stressful & upsetting trying to go about my business with the constant din everywhere.
But this phenomena that i call sensory difficulties/sensitivity due to the ME is not that (well i still have that, but this is different from that).
I've lost count of the times i have become exasperated by someone suggesting i cover the sound of the neighbour's hot tub heater humming, with the sound of 'a lovely water feature', because they simply cant seem to grasp, no matter how many times i tell them, that it would only make it worse, because then it would be
2 sounds, instead of only 1. (The fact that i dont especially
like the sound of the tub is entirely secondary & incidental.)
does familiarity significantly reduce the energy demand?
Not really no. Not like how reading something you've read before is less demanding because you dont have to learn the characters, music doesnt require me to remember anything about what went before like understanding a paragraph does.
Is one pitch so challenging on its own that it gobbles up energy, but only consumes a fraction of that when blended with the equivalent pitch an octave lower?
I dont know, im not a musician so i dont even really understand the question. If you mean does for example a high pitched violin become less problematic when combined with an orchestra? If so... then heck no! The more instruments = the more sound, which is 99/100 worse, the more complex the sounds the worse it is.
For example - my favourite sound = blackbird or song thrush.
worst bird song ever = cockatiel screeching.
4 blackbirds singing at once (they dont do that but hypothetically) would be worse, hurt more, make me more ill, than 1 x cockatiel.
4 cockatiels are worse than 4 blackbirds, but
only because of the added extra energy demand of having to psychologically tolerate the hideous nerve shredding aspect of it. So its impact on my ME, the pain it causes would be the same, but it would lead to PEM faster because i would be spending energy emotionally as i shuddered. There is no way you could make it less of a problem by mixing it with other sounds - 4 cockatiels + 6 blackbirds to 'drown it out' would be even worse still.
. I've decided that it's because I'm listening and watching extremely critically to the technical aspects going on as they relate to the end result rather than just focusing on the end result, so I'm not emotionally invested in the music - well maybe in the quietly tearing my hair out way, but that's different.
On a good day, my inability to put three words together is funny; on a bad day it's the start of a meltdown. Luckily friends know about it and never expect me to hold conversations in cafes where they have music on.
) so I can't say I got anything immediately satisfying out of it. Must be blind panic I suppose yet it still doesn't consume lots of energy.