die down - trail off

[dilodi83]

- I was watching the match on the tv and suddenly a cheer went up when the home team shot, but after a few seconds it died down.
- When another cheer went up from the stadium, though, my girlfriend's voice trailed off.

In these two sentences both thetwo phrasal verbs in bold mean that a sound or a voice or a noise becomes less loud little by little until it stops.
My question is: Are they used indifferently without any different shade of meaning or do you use them with some particular collocations so that maybe it's better to use one instead of the other?
Thanks so much for your explanation.

[dilodi83]

someone who can help me with this post?

[emsr2d2]

- I was watching the match on the tv and suddenly a cheer went up when the home team shot, but after a few seconds it died down.
- When another cheer went up from the stadium, though, my girlfriend's voice trailed off.

In these two sentences both thetwo phrasal verbs in bold mean that a sound or a voice or a noise becomes less loud little by little until it stops.
My question is: Are they used indifferently without any different shade of meaning or do you use them with some particular collocations so that maybe it's better to use one instead of the other?
Thanks so much for your explanation.

I feel a slightly different meaning between the two.

"Trailed off" does mean to get quieter and then stop.
"Died down" can just mean "get quieter". The noise from the crowd may have died down from a huge cheer to just a dull throbbing roar and then gone back up to a cheer again as soon as their team got hold of the ball again. It doesn't necessarily mean it stopped completely.

We use them differently in some contexts though. "The wind died down", not "The wind trailed off". I also wouldn't use "died down" for a single person's voice, so in your example about the girlfriend, we wouldn't say "My girlfriend's voice died down".

[dilodi83]

by the way, why has my post been moved away??