Tired of the constant knocking on your apartment wall from the other room yelling at you to lower the volume of your sound system? Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Are you fed up with the annoying noise from the other unit—the irritating sound of a bawling baby, the endless shouting of a couple who are at each other’s neck or worse, the crashing of broken china and hurled furniture?
Well, if you think you’re already comfortable and at home in your own apartment, there’s no need to leave it and transfer to a new one. If you’re unlucky, you might end up in still the same predicament. What you need to do is consider another less-stressful alternative: soundproofing.
Benefits of Soundproofing
Soundproofing is the best way to rid most of the bothersome noise from the outside world. By confining your house or apartment with soundproofing materials, you are assuring yourself peace of mind and much-deserved privacy.According to Quiet Livity, Soundproofing is not only good for musicians or music lovers who minimize the tone from their musical instruments by soundproofing their room or space. It is a requirement for anyone who values a quiet and noise-free environment. Band members need to soundproof their rehearsal studio just as a private person should soundproof their bedroom to ward off unwanted sounds and avoid bothering others with their noise. If you are a writer who writes novels or is commissioned to write articles for a paper, then you also need to soundproof your unit to shun aggravating sounds that destroy your concentration. Also, a scholar who is serious about their academic studies will benefit greatly from soundproofing.
How to Soundproof a Room for Dummies
There are a number of ways on which you can do soundproofing; the most common are noise absorption and noise barriers. By noise absorption, you are soundproofing a room by using insulation and absorptive materials such as foam on the walls and ceiling. Every time a sound wave passes through these insulating materials, a portion of the energy is sucked up by converting it to heat. Absorbers are ideal when there is some sort of a flat surface behind them like a wall because then the sound will be reflected back, thus reducing effects of noise. For low frequency sounds on the other hand, a gap in which air could pass between the absorber and the wall is mostly recommended.The other method is by using noise barriers. A noise barrier usually comprises almost any nonporous material. Some characteristics of an effective barrier is high mass and density and a low resonant frequency to deflect sound energy. Sound pressure levels increase in proportion to sound power. The vibrating effect that high sound power levels create to any surface they encounter causes the walls to virtually shake. Low frequency sounds which have more energy because a larger volume of air is displaced to produce the long wavelengths of bass frequencies, easily excite the most common building materials such as wood and thick drywall board.
In a nutshell, noise absorption is simply transforming the sound while noise barrier is blocking the sound. Noise absorption, also called damping, involves suppressing echo and reverberation.
If you don’t have any idea what to do or where to start, the best option is to hire a soundproofing contractor to do the entire job for you. It would be futile for you to experiment on soundproofing your room when you can’t even identify what materials to use and don’t know how to distinguish a square foot from an inch. It’s better to find a trustworthy contractor who’ll manage sound proofing your room and will do everything that’s needed to be done. This way, you will not only save a lot of time and energy, you will also cut some slack on the money you would’ve wasted had you foolishly taken over the job of soundproofing on your own.
