Whether it's the booming stereo radiating from the next car, a dog barking incessantly, or the neighbor blasting Bon Jovi, noise has enraged most everyone.

Towns have passed laws to deal with it and numerous gadgets have been developed to protect from it. But few have taken their hatred for noise as far as Houston's Barney Vincelette.

A case of mild autism has made him extremely sensitive to noise. Vincelette, who lives in a spaceship-style house, thinks music, especially top 40, rap and rock 'n' roll, "sounds the same way feces smells."

Vincelette used his genius-level IQ and parts of household microwave ovens to develop a makeshift device that uses electromagnetic waves to temporarily jam the circuitry of his neighbors' stereos.

"Many people just assume that you should be able to have this music in your backyard. But it is such an ugly music that it takes over one's life," he said. "That's why I fight back against it."

Vincelette is so sensitive to noise that he's gone as far as shooting and killing a dog that barked nonstop outside his apartment. He paid a $100 fine and was evicted.

"I'm not terribly proud to have done that but I was at the end of my rope," he said. "The way the law was, there was nothing I could do about it and there was no place I could live that didn't have dogs barking all night and all day."

That sensitivity to noise ignites a rage within Vincelette that has turned neighbors into enemies.

Elizabeth Ramirez, who lives in a mobile home next door, said Vincelette likes to "control" her family with his sound-stopping inventions.

Andy and Shirley Snead also have had a dispute. In August 2002, Vincelette, annoyed by the thumping bass from their stereo, rigged truck horns to an air compressor and blared it.

Police issued a disorderly-conduct citation, which carried a hefty fine.

"A policeman told me he heard it a mile away," Vincelette said.

But instead of paying the ticket, he recorded the noise and sent it to a professional musician and personal friend in the Netherlands.

His friend wrote a letter declaring "Sonata for Calliope of Truck Horns About to be Transcribed for Locomotive Horns Opus No. 1" as music.

Armed with the letter, Vincelette contested the fine in court, arguing it amounted to "selective enforcement."

The charges were dropped. His relationship with the Sneads now is civil.

"I'm not going to say anything good about him and I'm not going to say anything bad about him," Andy Snead said.

For Vincelette, it was a victory of sorts.

"If they can play their music, then I can play mine," he said.

Life in a saucer

Vincelette considers himself a nonconformist. All it takes is one look at his house to see why.

He bought the house, which he found in the now-defunct Whole Earth Catalog, in 1977 and had it delivered to his lot in Houston, a small Kent County town between Milford and Harrington.

There are dozens of other spaceship-style homes across the country, but for Vincelette, living in a flying saucer is a statement on architecture.

"So many houses aren't what they appear to be. They have fake siding and fake window shutters. They try to imitate something other than what they are," he said. "I couldn't get motivated to work to pay a mortgage for an architectural Muzak."

The interior is cramped. The bedroom accommodates little more than the bed; the kitchen is the size of a child's closet and the bathroom has no tub, just a shower stall.

He designed an entertainment system with a projector screen that hovers in the middle of the room and he built his own security system to frighten off intruders. He decorated the inside with artificial sheepskin dyed electric green.

And Vincelette loves it all.

He especially loves the shape of his house, made out of fiberglass siding.

"It has a geometric simplicity to it," he said.

The front door descends and raises with a push of a button.

But Carol, his wife, does not enjoy spaceship living.

"We don't have enough space," she said. "It was fine when he lived by himself here but it's difficult for both of us. I would like to live in a bigger house."

The couple, introduced through a mutual friend, married 15 years ago.

"He seemed to be not like some other men I would meet, who were less sensitive," she said. "But I constantly worry about our future and if we'll be able to retire."

Carol said she does occasional, personal work as a nurse. Vincelette, who has a pilot's license, was a navigator for the Air Force during the Vietnam War, where he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But he's had difficulty holding jobs because of his sensitivity toward noise, particularly certain types of music.

"It has a corrosive effect on the nerves that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything," he said.

Many people with autism have an extreme sensitivity to noise, said Dr. Lynn Koegel, clinical director at the Koegel Autism Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She has researched autistic children who suffer when they hear toilets flush or blenders run.

"It can be like claustrophobia or agoraphobia for them," she said. "These kinds of fears can cause a lot of problems and disrupt the functioning of people's lives."

Vincelette may have found his niche in academia. He has one doctorate from a non-accredited university and he is on scholarship at Delaware State University, working on a double doctorate thesis on early cancer detection and mathematical physics.

"He's very sharp-minded," said his professor, Dr. Vesna Zeljkovic, who has a brother with autism. "He has very good ideas and he has a very high level of abstract cognitive thinking. He's a person made for learning and studying and this is a good environment for him."

A different perspective

Elizabeth Ramirez sees Vincelette through a different lens.

She lives in a mobile home next door and has called police to complain about him on several occasions.

Vincelette and Ramirez have restraining orders against each other.

"I have no respect for him," she said.

Ramirez once was arrested when Vincelette called police to say she had tried to ram him with her vehicle. Ramirez denies it.

Vincelette said they know about his autism, but play loud music anyway.

"It is the same way someone would feel if they were sprinkled with urine in their face," he said. "It's a feeling of rage from being violated."

Ramirez said her "son sometimes has some music on but nothing loud or obnoxious."

But Vincelette will "put something on that sounds like airplanes or trains. There are boxes of microwaves that go in there and he has these chemical devices that he uses and the poor trees out here are dying because of it," Ramirez said.

That box of microwaves is for the Uber Cultural Hygiene Machine, the invention that recently was published in the book "MORE Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius."

On several occasions, Vincelette has used it to temporarily disable the Ramirezes' stereo system.

"I was one time able to get their stereo buzzing pretty loud using microwave beams," he said.

The device -- fashioned from the magnetrons of microwaves, copper sheeting, soldering paste and an electric fan -- probably is illegal, said Delaware State police Cpl. Jeff Whitmarsh.

"If it completely disabled a device, it would be considered criminal mischief," he said. "If it just disrupted it, it would cause disorderly conduct."

But for Vincelette, it's a weapon in his war against the music industry.

"The fanaticism of the junk culture and its forms is so extremist in its music that it forces everyone to live and hear their music," he said. "It makes al-Qaida look like the Unitarian Church."

Past troubles

It isn't just music that bothers Vincelette.

In the spring of 1977, when he was a graduate student at the University of Georgia, he got into a confrontation with a woman who was smoking cigarettes nearby.

She blew smoke in his face. He took out a spray can filled with tear gas and fired it at her face. It also hit her boyfriend's face.

Vincelette was arrested shortly afterward. His mother, living in New Jersey at the time, found out about the incident after it made national news.

The Athens-Clarke County Superior Court in Georgia confirmed that on April 22, 1977, Vincelette was arrested for simple battery.

"She didn't want her parents finding out that she was living with her boyfriend, so she dropped the charges," Vincelette said. "I was willing to fight it. It's a very intimate physical violation for someone else to use your body as their private sewage dump for cigarette smoke."

Contact Hiran Ratnayake at 324-2547 or hratnayake@delawareonline.com.