While I understand how difficult a noisy upstairs neighbor can be, these two sentences are worrisome. Neither police officer who came out in response to your noise complaints thought that your complaint had any merit, AND you had issues with the previous tenant as well.
I am not there, and I do not know what is actually going on beyond your description of the situation. However, these two statements together could be seen to paint a different picture than the one that you perceive. Are you sensitive to noise? Perhaps the genre of music that she plays makes it more bothersome than otherwise, and that is why your are more sensitive (I know that music I dislike seems a lot louder to me than does music that I like)?
Noise is likely one of those things with which it is difficult to point at the line which, when crossed, it is considered a clear nuisance and a violation of “quite hours” ordinances, unless there is a clear directive regarding decibel levels inside your home from another source.
What issues di you have with the previous tenant, if I may ask?
Would it work to get some sort of decibel meter and record what it is showing while the music is playing? I think that might be more objective evidence.
D1 lives in a brownstone. I could always tell when the upstairs neighbor is up. The downstairs neighbor’s daughter practices piano few hours a day (right below the baby’s room), except she is pretty good so it is not bad.
My neighbor upstairs has a kid who likes to bounce a ball and also likes to drag a chair across the room. I have only asked the doorman to intervene a few times.
Apparently my next door neighbor likes opera, but lucky for me that our walls are well insulated.
Try getting NoiseAware. vacation rentals use them to watch out for parties. It should give you a definitive display of the noise level, then you can determine by that if you are unreasonable, or she is, or it’s somewhere in the middle.
My husband has exquisite hearing and finds many noises painful whereas I can easily ignore them, it could be you have a hypersensitivity and she is rude? But you’d need something measurable and impartial to prove noise levels.
When I had a neighbor with a barking dog, I would call animal control while the dog was barking so the officer could hear it.
It has nothing to do with the type of music, loud music is annoying if you’re not playing it. The previous tenant usually wasn’t loud in the late hours, his noise was just odd and seemed intentional. I have no luck with neighbors
I downloaded an app that measures decibel levels but the officer said that they need to use their own measurer to confirm if it’s violating noise ordinance
The property mgr is kinda useless, he didn’t help with the other tenant. The HOA said they will reach out to the tenant and her property mgr once they provide warning