Understanding How to Sound Travels And Deflect Noise

Understanding how sound waves travel through air and solid materials is the key to deflect it. However, many struggle with soundproofing is because we confuse sound with light. Although both are kinds of energy that travel in wave form, light waves have much shorter wavelengths than sounds and are far easier to block out: it's much simpler to make your house pitch black than completely quiet. Unlike light waves, long-wavelength sounds can bend round corners and wriggle through the tiniest cracks and openings. Keep in mind that, while light waves pass through only a handful of solid materials such as transparent plastic and glass, sound energy will easily pass through most solids and result almost as loud the other side.

Sound travels in 2 ways:

• Through the air

Sound traveling through the air is easy to understand.  Any holes you have in the room are sound leaks such as from outlets, switches, can lights, gaps under doors, HVAC ducting and other factors are all sound transmission paths.

• Through the structure

Sound vibrates your walls, your ceiling, your floor, your tin ducting and more. Are all of those things are connected to other parts of the building.  When they are caused to vibrate by the sound in your room, the other side or what they’re connected to also vibrate and recreate that sound in other parts of the building.

Putting sound proof insulation is important for many of reasons and one of the most commonly reason is to stop sound from bothering other people in the house or other people outside the room. A more important reason to put sound proof insulation is to stop sound from penetrating into the room. Soundproofing a wall involves employing one or more strategies commonly used by home builders. The first is to decouple the drywall from the studs so that the sound doesn't pass through the wood. The second is to provide some kind of sound-absorbing material inside the wall or behind the drywall. The third is to add mass to the wall so it doesn't vibrate as easily. Lastly is to add some material on the surface that dampens the sound waves. Doing these strategies requires specialized building materials including flexible sealant and metal channel. Home builders use conventional fiberglass batt insulation for this purpose, as long as the drywall hasn't been hung yet. Another option is to blow cellulose or fiberglass loose-fill insulation into the wall through access holes. While insulation prevents reverberating and absorbs sound, it must be combined with other soundproofing methods to get the most benefit from using it. Sound proof insulation materials that are designed to block sound from entering or leaving a space are almost always found inside the wall construction. Sometimes a sound proof insulation can be heavy, dense, cumbersome or designed to decouple the wall so that one side of the wall doesn’t have hard surface contact.