Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
Apparently it leaked to much water into the ground nearby that shocks were transmissible. Whenever a heavy lorry/truck drove along that road late at night, it would shake the building a little and rattle plates in the same way.
When they finally fixed it (after the road got beautifully resurfaced by the council, then dug up 3 days later by...Thameswater) presumably the water fell down into the water table and we've not had any shaking since.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
However—since you mention getting out of your (presumably otherwise quiet?) house onto the street—I also encountered a phenomenon in which presence of subtle other noise (which in your case could be tree leaves rustling and so on, and in my case was a literal white noise machine) make a sound that in a completely quiet room would drive me insane significantly less of a problem. This is not to say “it is all in your head” because, well, how you perceive it is what matters at the end of the day.
Hopefully your bass player neighbour could understand and use headphones or practice at a different time.
I'm certainly not the only one in my neighborhood who would go postal if I had to live in a "quite" neighborhood where people complain about the noise each other's landscaping services make and call the cops when parties run late.