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Tricks and Tips to Reducing Sound

I’ve lived and stayed at a number of apartments and dorms during my college career. Every place seemed to have different degrees of nose reduction. I’ve gone from hearing every word my neighbors speak to not hearing a peep from the mysteriously large party next door. I’ve always wondered what is it that causes these extreme differences. Are walls at the various apartments around the periphery of my old college campus so unique from one another? Are the builders using different materials, wall thickness and isolation? Without doing a detailed study on apartment walls I’ll assume the answer to my questions is ‘yes’.

Noise can sneak through walls like poisonous gas. It moves through a series of vibrations, allowing sound to move through solid objects. If living in an apartment, dorm or close-courtiers housing there are a few steps you can take to prevent a noise battle between you and your neighbors. First of all, you can always bite the bullet and renovate your walls, but unless your an industrial company or a house owner it’s hard to justify such a project for a place your only going to spend one or two years in.

When soundproofing a room or building it’s important to determine what kind of noise you are attempting to damper. Noise reception describes incoming noise and noise transmission refers to outgoing noise. Many industrial companies are required to focus on noise transmission due to local noise regulations and worker safety. When muffling audible aggravations there are three different avenues to choose from; space, mass and dampening. If you take the space avenue you are to increase the amount of…space between your ears and the source of the noise. Mass involves heftier walls and sponge like material to soak up sound waves. Lastly, dampening refers to convert structure-borne sound waves to heat energy. Using insulation is a good example of this.

Perhaps the best step to reducing noise in a room is to install carpet. Wood and tile floors are good conductors for sound waves. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of carpet installations, area rugs can do the trick as well. Also, purchasing thick drapes can make a huge difference in noise levels, reducing sound levels by up to ten decibels. White noise generators are also available if you want to fight fire with fire. These are just a few examples. There are many more ways to reduce the noise levels of a room, home or factory.