Need suggestions for soundproofing my place
Hello All!
recently moved into an apartment and happy with it for the most part and grateful to have a place to call my own.
One issue has been the sound though. I am a remote software developer and work for a company that is 3 hours ahead of me. I personally prefer getting up at 3 am my time, enjoying my breakfast with a bit of TV and then signing into work at 4 am and getting off as 12 pm.
It's a life style thanks to covid and luckily landing jobs in a part of the country that is 4 timezones ahead of me but I enjoy being able to have the rest of the day for myself.
However, this move is the first time I am living in an apartment and that means sound can penetrate to neighbors. I had assumed that given the building was cement or concrete or whatever (I just know its not wood), that sound would not be an issue, but apparently given that my living room is right next to my neighbors' bedroom, I have had repeated noise complaints that I make noise during the building quiet hours (10 pm - 7 am)
Some were understandable, I was watching a movie at 3 am on a weekend and my TV is up against the wall that is shared with my neighbor. Bought some headphones and apparently that issue has gone away, but yesterday for example, I was on a call with a colleague at around 6 am and I can admittedly be loud. What I didn't anticipate was that I can be loud enough that it carries through the walls. This amongst other things (like me walking around in my own place which actually lead my property manager to push back on my behalf and tell them that's not a legit complaint they can have and makes no sense given I don't live above them) lead to a noise complaint.
Thankfully my building manager has been nice enough about it (I think cause she can tell I am not being malicious and I do want to be considerate of my neighbor, I just really underestimated how much sound travels in this building).
But this whole thing is making me a bit off about the situation cause if my neighbor could hear me on a call with my colleague, then they can also hear me when I am doing a counseling session from home if they happened to be in their bedroom at the same time and that makes me uncomfortable.
Which is making me research ways to prevent sound from my place going to my neighbors but I am by no means an expert in this field and wondered if anyone else has had experience with sound-proofing and can give tips.
It's a rental unit so it obviously can't be something that requires renovation and I prefer a solution that doesn't involve nails but if that's best, I can always ask permission from my property manager. I also don't plan to live here longer than 4 years (I hope to buy a condo of my own as soon as Trump leaves office) so I don't want to drop too much money on this.
the two things I kept coming across were:
- acoustic panels: not sure how invasive that is and if there's an adequate brand for people on a budget.
- a dampening blanket: but not sure how effective that is.
the wall's dimensions are 196 inch wide and 8 feet tall. However, if their bedroom is the same size of mine, it is only 159 inch wide.
Another low cost solution is just to move my desk to the other side of my living room so it's facing the opposite wall. The distance between the two walls is 160 inches and I'd be facing the opposite direction but I get worried that they could still hear me on calls if I move the desk to the opposite wall. But I also am not expert on sound dispersion and penetration so I could be wrong :shrug:
I know this doesn't help to solve your problem, but I've lived in a lot of different apartments and even accidentally triggered my own noise complaints that I fixed. But this stuck out to me:
Your neighbor has an unreasonable expectation of silence in an apartment if you walking in an adjacent unit is too loud. Props to the property manager acknowledging that's too much. You've been taking reasonable steps as a considerate neighbor.
To be fair, some people can have a very heavy step. I used to live downstairs from someone who would literally rattle the plates in my kitchen when she walked around her unit. She wasn’t big either, she was a short person with a fairly average build but her footfalls were thunderous!
Unless OP wears wooden clog shoes inside the house or Flamenco/Tap dances.
In seriousness that does sound unreasonable for apartment dwelling. I wonder if they're new to apartments and are holding on to single homes expectations
I grew up in tight tiny apartments where you can almost hear what the neighbour's argument is about, and where you can definitely critique whether the kid's piano lessons are going well or not. You just accept that people are within 15-20 feet of you at all times, and people make sounds.
I lived in an old building from the 50s with wooden floors. I heard people walking in adjacent apartments. I had someone below me who liked to stomp too. It was heard and felt ( vibrations ).
Yikes :p I hope soundproofing has been much better since the 50s. (Also, insane to think we're far closer to 2050s than 1950s, which might as well be dinosaur times according to my teen)
It’s actually often worse. Older buildings tended to use a lot more brick and concrete versus the stick-and-drywall construction we do today. All that mass is usually good for preventing sound from carrying.
This very much depends on the building, I think. But I'm quite lucky in how good the sound dampening is in my current (very new) building. I definitely had more issues hearing neighbors' steps in the older buildings I lived in previously. My upstairs neighbor is a violin teacher (they came to tell us so when they moved in) and I barely even hear that. The only stuff I've been properly bothered by in my unit is when a neighbor is drilling in the walls. Though I do have a neighbor somewhere whose sneeze I can somehow always hear with perfect clarity -- that one's more amusing than annoying though. Whatever needs to be done to make good soundproofing in a modern building, they must've done it! But I am also in Germany, where the expectations of quiet during quiet hours are higher than in the US.
Yeah building acoustics are weird. My office used to have these aluminum beam that ran up the windows across floors over the height of the building. On the bottom floor there was a sort of corporate event space/conference room where they tended to put the speakers near the beam. Any time anything was happening there the sound from the speaker would transmit up the pillar. I could hear everything being played perfectly clearly over those speakers if I put my ear to the aluminum beam.
As an audiobook narrator and voiceover actor this is a major issue all of us deal with. You’ve gotten good advice about soft surfaces but what works more than anything, and which is also more difficult than any of the solutions offered, is mass. You want weight between you and your neighbors.
The idea of a second wall is closest, but those walls should be filled with heavy insulation to absorb the energy of your voice. Like each 4x8 sheet of plywood’s worth of wall should weigh 90-100 lbs.
Everything else is kind of window dressing. Physics is such that you won’t be able to neutralize the sound waves of your energetic vocal delivery. In fact, some of these solutions might resonate more and make the trouble worse.
A low-cost version of this is the heaviest packing blankets you can find, hanging from the walls. Probably 20-30% as effective as insulated walls, but it might be all you can afford or can implement.
Good luck. The upside is you’ll have a well-treated space in which you can now record audio, if that does anything for you.
Cinder block walls are some of the worst for sound transfer (or so say my college dorm memories). Foam mattress toppers work wonders and can be quite affordable, especially if you only need to deal with that wall. Ugly, but they could be covered by a tapestry.
Lots of good advice about the room already, but for the volume of your voice, what kind of headphones are you using on the call? I've found I speak much louder when using my over-the-ear headphones (even with the noise canceling off) than if I'm using earbuds because I can't hear my own voice. So a different headset might be worth investigating.
I don't know anything bout the devices, but a sound or decibel meter with a visual display would provide feedback on your volume to help you speak more softly. It would also provide evidence for the building manager if you need it.
A phone with a dB meter app can serve surprisingly well. iPhones especially are reasonably accurate, Android phones less so, but what they show is not completele nonsense and will give you pretty accurate relative comparison at least: "I'm as loud as a TV set to a comfortable level" gives you useful information.
As someone with noisy neighbors, the walking is probably something that your neighbors normally wouldn't notice. It is just something that becomes noticeable if other sounds already annoy you. Luckily in our apartments the design is such that bedrooms don't border living rooms.
For me the neighbors are a mild annoyance but if I had to deal with the same sounds while trying to sleep I would be well beyond annoyed rather quickly.
From my experience, the sounds that come through from my neighbors are those coming from speakers. Like TVs but also work calls.
Dampening sounds with rugs, carpets, etc might help a bit in how harsh they come through the wall. These would also be the cheapest approach to start with. It is important to not only cover the wall facing your neighbors, but also the opposite wall so sound reflections are also minimized.
To actually stop sound you would need something like a second wall that isn't connected to the actual apartment wall. Basically you want an air gap between the two walls so sound vibrations aren't transfered through the structure.
This can be done fairly cheaply with a wooden frame and some drywall panels that are properly sealed at the seams. But, it will make your room smaller and still takes quite some work. There is still a change sound will travel through the floor (depending on the construction) so it isn't something I would go for immediately. I just figured I mention it for completeness.
Edit: Something else, try working with your neighbors. Ask if you can have a listen from their side with the tv on or with sounds playing from your desk. Do the same after you made some initial changes. It will help you better understand what they are hearing and also makes it so they feel heard (pun intended).
@b3_k1nd_rw1nd just curious if any of the advice in the thread was useful? :)
My recommendation is to add rugs, think when you walk into an empty house and it echoes, but furniture and rugs make it a lot softer in sound. This would be a great budget friendly option. I also recommend some sound dampening behind the TV, but you might also consider getting a speaker. Usually tv speakers are against the wall, but the speaker is directionally in the place you put it. Depending on where your office is, lots of pictures, tapestries, and curtains. Curtains all over the house ideally. It will help substantially. Fabric really dampers sound.
For privacy, especially when working, or therapy, get a sound machine. My therapist's office has them placed outside every door and it works. You can never tell who is there. You can't hear anything. I'd recommend getting one and just running it constantly. :)
But definitely invest in rugs and curtains!
To expand on the idea of adding rugs, just adding soft surfaces and reducing hard surfaces in general will help. Soft surfaces absorb sound, whereas hard surfaces will cause reflections. Parallel hard surfaces can cause sound waves to bounce back and forth, so best to try to reduce parallel hard surfaces. I know for sound treating a room, it is best to leave a slight air gap between the wall and acoustic treatment, so that it gets reduced in the soft surface, bounces off the hard surface, then gets reduced again in the soft surface. However, that is more for treating the room, rather than preventing bleed to neighbouring rooms
A quick search online has me thinking a stenographer's microphone, which cups the mouth completely, might be an option for dampening your voice for calls. They can be several hundred dollars though so maybe ask your company to consider expensing one for you?
When my living situation required more mindfulness for the noise I would make, I would retreat to the closet after filling it as full of fabrics as I could, that might be an effective solution as well.
White noise machines can help with the voice issue though they're usually designed to be placed outside of the room where people are speaking. Fans could help too, but functionally you're creating a low level of background noise to make it so your deliberate noise isn't so bad.
You do need to practice adjusting your speaking volume though! It's pretty key for apartment living. It's really mostly a practice thing.
That was my first thought. I have an adjacent neighbor who has things up against our shared wall and it makes things worse.
You are already using headphones and that helps a lot. Maybe make it a game to talk lower during meetings.
Rugs might help buffer the noise/vibrations of you walking.
I had some really noisey next door neighbors a few years ago and I asked a similar question. I didn't get good feedback about sound reduction technologies, so I don't know what else to suggest. Hopefully someone else in this thread knows of things that work. If so, I will be saving that information too!
Good luck.
How about moving your desk to that other wall and then building a "cubicle" around it?
Just some quick Amazon/Lowe's/Home Depot searching:
$30 for 24 sq ft in adhesive backed sound dampening squares
$15 each for cheap 4x8 hardboard panels
$3 each for 2x2x8 furring strips, use those to frame and stand the panels
$12 for a 20 pack of corner braces with screws
Cut 2 feet off a 4x8 so you've got a 4x6 = 24 sq ft panel, use the remnant 4x2 as the base, use the furling strips and L-brackets to frame it all, and you've got a movable 4 foot wide, 6 foot high sound deadening panel for I'm guessing about $80 in raw materials.
I don't know what you're considering 'budget' but I think you could do something effective for under $500.
I'd look to see if there's an office furnishings resale store in your area. I've had cheapskate employers buy cubicle walls from these places at about $100 per almost fully panel-enclosed 10' x 10' cube. That included desk, cabinet, and shelf add-ons which might not be what you're interested in, and the colors might not be appealing. But the cubicle walls did diminish conversational noise in fishbowl office environments. The walls are free-standing when joined, so no worries about mounting damage in a rental apartment. Say goodbye to your windows, but hopefully that's less of a concern if you're working at night.
That sounds like good news, but I've worked in cube farms and cube walls did nothing to reduce sound.
Unfortunately you can't get around physics; low frequency waves are excellent at penetrating solid structures, and the voice band extends low enough to make a decent job of it too, plus solid walls tend to be great at transferring sound energy. Also, different types of sound treatment are required for different frequency bands.
Ideally, as others have mentioned, you want another wall in between that is heavily insulated. Next best thing is suspending heavy rugs and/or broad spectrum acoustic panels with a gap from the wall - the transition between multiple physical mediums will each help to absorb and diminish sound energy.
More practically, move your setup away from the wall. I don't know how the layout of your apartment is, but, best case, get your desk around a corner wall if possible. From there, look at getting some large freestanding acoustic baffles and create a cubicle around your desk - essentially making a vocal booth here.
Hopefully you find something that suits your particular situation.
Also, your neighbours sound like overreacting dickheads. I used to live in a tiny one bed apartment, out of the three tenants that passed through the downstairs unit during that tenure two were very chill and assured me they could hear little more than footsteps while another went off the deep end completely with constant noise complaints - it can just be luck of the draw sometimes.