Now, what about my room? (Slightly OT, but...)

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:10 am

So, I know this is just a hair OT, but I couldn't find any place that seemed more appropriate to place this (because is IS slight on-topic as well). My apologies.

I live on the top floor of a new condo ... with ... heh ..supposedly noise-free floorings. Well, my downstairs neighbors (which are nice people and friends) have a child that around 1 y.o. He cries *constantly*. And it's to the point of distration for work. I can hear it echoning through the walls and floor.

I do already have soundproof blanketing on the walls because I do recording/practicing for time ot time. But all that really does is deaden the sound *within* the room.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Post by **Rusty075** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:16 am

Do you have carpet or wood floors?

What's the building construction type? (ie, wood framed low-rise vs concrete/steel high-rise)

From your end, there's not a lot you can do: adding dampening to the floor will be expensive and only marginally effective. A much more effective solution would be to install an acoustic ceiling in the condo below you. But trying to broach that idea might really test the friendship with your neighbors.

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:24 am

Rusty075 wrote:Do you have carpet or wood floors?

What's the building construction type? (ie, wood framed low-rise vs concrete/steel high-rise)

A much more effective solution would be to install an acoustic ceiling in the condo below you. But trying to broach that idea might really test the friendship with your neighbors.

(thanx for reply, btw, rusty

)

Carpet floors, with double padding (I was planning on this being a studio room from the beginning). I also have an area rug!

Construction is 3 floor wood framed with siding. We're top floor, and our front room has vaulted ceilings. My office does not.

I hadn't considered paying to have them install an acoustic ceiling (Which is actually a possibility since it would cut down on the noise I send their way too. I always check in with them about my noise levels...) What does that mean/what is involved in that?

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 4:08 pm

Well, this page explains it ALL.

http://www.soundproofing.org/

Very different ideas here, ones where you trap sound, not change it. Says carpeting blocks none of the sounds that are irritating, of course a carpeted room doesnt AMPLIFY sound that leaks, but it does leak more than one thinks. I suggest trapping the sound on a wall, like on two walls perpendicular to one another, then sound wont bounce and amplify. sound proof some of your ceiling will help as well. I learned that its all about the bounce, but the low booms and thuds are for places like that link only to cure.

pricey yes, but check out the pyramid mats as well as the lil pads that go under things, reducing vibrations and resonance.

kind of an odd page, but really neato cheatos

-------------

I have to add, that patches of sound deadening in a room do help, and carpets do help, but the mat underneath them should be more like their stuff and less like normal carpet padding. "closed cell" foams and materials.

Also, dont drop a ciggarrette on this crap, im wondering about that factor with my pipe, sometimes a lil coal pops out.....

ChucuSCAD · Post by **ChucuSCAD** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 4:23 pm

The best thing that you can do since you really do not have access to the floor below you is to install a raised floor system, either one like they use in data centers or you can simply build one yourself. Then you can line the backside of the flooring system with acoustic dampening material. If you require more information on these systems or material just PM me and I will look up specific systems in my library, I happen to be an architect.

ChucuSCAD

Green Shoes · Post by **Green Shoes** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 7:25 pm

two words......baby benadryl.

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:04 pm

Green Shoes wrote:two words......baby benadryl.

lol

ChucuSCAD, I'll send you a PM. I'm not familiar with that kind of system or material. It sounds interesting.

THe soundproof blankets I have actually hang loose, so there's already a bit of space built in. However, there's nothing on my ceiling so maybe that would help.

My wife found some sort of dense soundproof vinyl online, but I guess it's very expensive and we'd have to strip everything to the drywall for it to work best.

hmmm...

Post by **Rusty075** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 8:29 pm

Back off Chucu, only one Architect allowed per thread, and since my name shows up in orange, I get ot be in charge.

Short of what Chucu suggested, you could add a mass dampening layer to the existing floor, something like the vinyl mats your wife found, or even lead sheets. You'd have to pull up the carpet, have the mats installed, and then have the carpet relayed.

The acoustic ceiling I described is something you've certainly seen before, but probably never realised that that was its purpose. They're commonly referred to as "drop ceilings" and consist of a gridwork of lay-in tiles supported by a metal frame the hangs from the ceiling. The panels are fiberglass, or foam, or cellulose, and usually have a pattern of little tiny holes. The downside to them is that they are generally ugly as sin. They're usually reserved for commercial spaces, like classrooms and offices.

In case you haven't guessed it, there aren't any simple, easy solutions. Any of the solutions we've talked about will cost you big money. Maybe only in the low thousands for the acoustical ceiling, which your neighbors won't let you do anyway, up to probably tens of thousands for a cavity floor like Chucu described. Controlling and conditioning the sound once its in the room, like you're doing in your studio space, is much easier than stopping it from getting there in the frst place, unfortunately.

Maybe offer to build them a nice soundproof box to put the kid in?

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 1:59 am

Umm, not exactly my turf but...

I think you need something in the way of acoustic barrier more than dampening or trapping. You'd want the sound to reflect "back", rather than absorb it.

You'll also want this for the high"er"-frequency noise than lower. I'm not too up-to-date on materials but I've heard suggested that compressed melamine tiles are a cheap & effective solution to noise transferrence between floors.

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 6:51 am

compressed melamine tiles

That's another new one for me. I'll have to check on the price of that...not sure how to impliment.

Rusty's comments about cost are confirming my suspicions...and also what my wife wrote to me in an email.

Um, so after doing a little bit of research it looks like we have 2 options:

1 - create some "white noise" in the room
2- move

Okay, okay, I guess instead of moving we could spend 2-3 thousand dollars and have the walls and floor ripped out in your room and install this super-dense vinyl stuff. But is would almost be smarter for us just to move!

The white noise won't work (heh ... that's what I just got RID of by spending all this money on my PC

) I think my total budget at this point can't go more than $500-$1000 unfortunately.

Green Shoes · Post by **Green Shoes** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:23 am

This might be a silly question, but...could you move your office to another room? I know when we lived in a place with two babies above us, the room below the babies' room was always noisy, but you usually couldn't hear them in the other bedroom (although sometimes you could hear other things...

) It might not be an option, but I was just curious.

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:29 am

It does seem like an obvious answer. Unfortunately they have two children -- seperate rooms.

tay · Post by **tay** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:25 am

What about heating/cooling vents? If you share those, they tend to allow a lot of sound through especiall yof the mid/high frequencies of a child crying. You shouldnt much care about low frequency (< 100 Hz) i think. Other than that the raised floor sounds like the best option.

Green Shoes · Post by **Green Shoes** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:53 am

tay wrote:What about heating/cooling vents? If you share those, they tend to allow a lot of sound through especiall yof the mid/high frequencies of a child crying. You shouldnt much care about low frequency (< 100 Hz) i think. Other than that the raised floor sounds like the best option.

Good point, a lot of apartments are built this way. The real bummer is, although you don't need to worry about bass frequencies, the main formant of a crying child is near 400 Hz...that's right in that no man's land that general sound diffusers don't grab, and bass traps don't quite go that high often.....you might wind up with this muffled crying sound, unless you have something thick enough to block waveforms that long.

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 9:29 am

www.tiflex.co.uk

&

www.pritex.co.uk

may point you in a good direction or offer some ideas... maybe just be an interesting read along the lines of what has already been offered...

Pete

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 12:32 pm

I got the melamine tile idea from the architect downstairs when I probed him for possible sources of melamine foam. He said they used it on floors to significantly reduce clicking noise produced by sharp womens heels. Might be just your thing. From his description I imagined normal floor tiles, hard & brittle.

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:31 pm

burcakb wrote:I got the melamine tile idea from the architect downstairs when I probed him for possible sources of melamine foam. He said they used it on floors to significantly reduce clicking noise produced by sharp womens heels. Might be just your thing. From his description I imagined normal floor tiles, hard & brittle.

well, in theatre, there's stuff thats compressed cardboard in stacks, about 3/4 inch thick, kinda cheap, only theater people ask for it it seems, i forgot its name, we used to line flooring with it, blocks on footsteps, but also killed a lot of sound from morons living below the theaters in off-off broadway ny.

I shut up all my neighbors and their kids. I just go up to them and intimidate them in a way people arent supposed to. But that was me I guess.

I suggest an alternative is to get a pair of 14"+ Cerwin Vega speakers and a tube amp and turn that on to some dark techno repeating track, then go out of the house for the night until 8 am. That worked too, not too loud for cops, just enough to make people unhappy.

I am not a typical spcr forum correspondent, I'm beginning to think.

Oh, i keep editing this: heres a tip: Drink a lot and bring a lot of people over. Youll never notice much of anything, thats what eventually happened.

freshjuice · Post by **freshjuice** » Sat Mar 19, 2005 10:21 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:
burcakb wrote:
Oh, i keep editing this: heres a tip: Drink a lot and bring a lot of people over. Youll never notice much of anything, thats what eventually happened.

LOL -- that reminds me of one of my wife's suggested solutions:

"Add some white noise."

The Black Cursor · Post by **The Black Cursor** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 12:43 pm

You'll want to look into de-coupling the ROOM as much as possible from the rest of the structure. This is often done by building a "room-within-a-room" using parallel walls with air-space between, or staggered stud construction. For the floor, you'll be building a raised floor. You would then insulate the wall, ceiling and floor spaces.

The following is a good discussion on this topic,

Just how crazy is this idea for ceiling sound reduction?

You'll want to pay attention to any post by Dennis Erskine. He often uses the analogy of the aquarium -- if water can get in/out of a room, so can sound. Of course, this... could... get... EXPENSIVE.

Be seeing you...

---> TBC (Think, Build, Consume)

Post by **Rusty075** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 3:03 pm

Ecoustics.com recently published an excellent article on this subject: Sound Isolation and Noise Control. There's a nice mix of theory and practice in the article, and plenty of specifics. There's even typical construction details. It's written by two of the guys from Rives Audio.

chylld · Post by **chylld** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 3:15 pm

spawn some children of your own, in the hope that it'll get them to acoustically damp their room because of the noise of yourchildren

it's a perfect plan!.. except for one little thing i can't quite put my finger on...

moritz · Post by **moritz** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 3:17 pm

I guess it's not very helpful, but this is a case where I'd just go for the dignified tolerance/headphone router. Chances are the endless wailing will end reasonably soon, anyway, only to resume when they reach puberty, of course. I don't know, spending multi kilobucks just doesn't seem like a good investments considering that this is just a temporary problem. How about using some of that money to go on a prolongued vacation instead?