the adventures of teapot the cat

In Search of Silence

Posted on November 6th, 2005

I recently moved into a nice loft space - concrete floors, large open rooms. I love it. The only problem I had was that too much noise leaked into and out of the apartment (I don’t want to have to worry about disturbing my neighbors when I watch a movie at a decent volume, or when I have a couple friends over) After some research [part 2] I found out that the major culprits of sound leakage are doors, windows, and walls.

Very generally, the easiest path for sound to take is through air. Also, the less dense or thick an object, the more sound transmission is possible. Single pane windows offer little acoustic protection from the ‘beautiful’ street sounds of San Francisco. Double-glazing would help a little, but I’m not that lucky. So short of boarding them up with wood, I realized I couldn’t do much about my wonderful huge windows. My roomy uncarpeted loft did offer good structural buffering - concrete does a nice job of stopping sound. But it does make for a sometimes unpleasant echo chamber; carpeting is good for absorbing sound within a space. And last but not least, the doors. Oh, the doors. After installing some closed cell foam weatherstripping and a door sweep (transom), things were sounding mighty hushed. It’s surprising how well these two cheap and easy mods helped, and I recommend working on at least a minimal amount of soundproofing if your apartment has acoustic leakage problems. Spending a bit of quality time with your appliances could also help you sleep at night.

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