When speaking about property rights issues and vibration, we need to be clear about specific property rights and individual actions to avoid creating wrongful restrictions or damage to third parties.

What we perceive as sound is the vibration of air molecules. If there is no air, there can be no vibration, which is why you cannot speak in a vacuum.

Respect of property rights with noise/vibration is wholly a question of whether the vibration rises to displacement/disruption by physical intrusion or damage.

For example, if someone plays loud music on their property that their neighbor can hear, but that music does not move their neighbor’s possessions through vibration or cause hearing damage, that sound cannot be forcibly abated as there has not been a property rights violation.

Now, if the sound were turned up so high that the vibration caused objects in a neighbor’s house to shake, that would be a property rights violation. So too would be sound causing hearing damage to someone else situated on their own private property, such as persistent noise over 70 decibels as measured on the neighbor’s property.

In similar example, a man who owns a bat, picks up an unowned rock, and smashes that rock with his bat so the rock flies into his neighbor’s window and breaks it, would be committing a property rights violation.

It does not matter that the man who hit the rock with his bat did not himself carry the rock to the neighbor’s window by hand. It only matters that their discrete property rights were used to damage the window specifically and causally, a window which is the neighbor’s independent property.

In a free market, sound and noise issues would be chiefly dealt with through sound proofing, land spacing, and community design, to avoid disruptive noise.

To the extent a sound falls below physical damage or disruption, but is still a nuisance, an individual has the option of either a.) adjusting their property rights to provide insulation, b.) asking the neighbor to turn down their volume or c.) serving up the sound in kind to get their neighbor to empathize with their plight should they refuse.

This balance respects property rights by enabling sanction against those whose vibrations physically disrupt and harm others while still maintaining property rights security for those who simply wish to play music or mow their lawn with a noisy, but not physically-disruptive engine.

Anything less than this standard becomes an infringement on property rights by either denying ethical use or by destroying/disrupting the property rights of a third party through excessive noise.

Remember too that, in the comparative to statist norms now, noise issues are not perfectly handled. People can get noise permits for events, and sound issues still persist depending on what the laws for acceptable sound levels are, from car audio exceptions, to exceptions for government activities.

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Further reading on the scientific concepts mentioned:

Sound

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound

What Noises Cause Hearing Loss?

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/hearing_loss/what_noises_cause_hearing_loss.html

Loud Party Music & Florida Laws

https://legalbeagle.com/7221539-loud-party-music-florida-laws.html