Sound can leak through tiny gaps around windows and doors.
Several factors affect your ability to insulate a room from outside sounds, whether from another room or outdoors. These factors may include your home's layout and building materials, the density of the barriers between rooms and the presence of tiny gaps along adjoining surfaces. You can add acoustic insulation in the form of double-glazed windows, sound-absorbent mineral wool between walls and mass-loaded vinyl matting between floors and ceilings.
Strategic Layout
When assigning specific purposes to the rooms in your home, you should decide which rooms will require a quiet environment, such as a bedroom or study, and which rooms naturally lend themselves to noise, such as a home theater, kitchen or game room. By setting up your "quiet rooms" as far away as possible from your "noisy rooms," you can partially insulate the quiet areas from annoying, distracting sounds. The 56-foot length of the lowest bass tones, however, may render this strategy inadequate for smaller homes.
Materials
Building materials can also affect acoustics, as some materials reflect sound in the form of an echo, while materials absorb sound or allow it to pass through. Denser materials have less chance of resonating sound waves, or bounce around, and will disallow sound from passing through. Gypsum board, which is a relatively light material, will transmit more sound through resonance than concrete. Other materials, such as the mineral wool used for insulation, tend to absorb sound and prevent it from continuing through the material into other rooms, according to Eurima.
Flanking Transmission
Flanking transmission refers to a sound's ability to travel both over or under surfaces separating one space from another. Even a tiny gap between a light switch and a wall can allow sound to transmit. Windows, doors, floor joists and ceiling junctures can all foil your efforts at sound insulation. Shared floors, ceilings, walls or plumbing pipes in an apartment building, hotel or duplex can transmit sound from one room to another.
Remediation
Acoustic insulation companies make products that, when installed properly, can prevent sound transmission. These products include soundproof doors, acoustic ceiling panels and flooring pads made of mass-loaded vinyl. Some varieties of double-glazed windows will block out as much as 70 percent of exterior sounds.You can also wrap pipes in sound insulating materials to keep them quiet. If you wish to move into a new apartment or other multi-unit dwelling, however, you may have little or no ability to change the materials or structures there. Prospective tenants should inspect the property and ask about its ability to insulate you from neighboring noise.
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