I am easily disturbed by noise, especially when working or sleeping. The building next to my apartment is currently undergoing a huge renovation/reconstruction, so I set off trying to figure out how to make my bedroom and office quieter.
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Most advice about residential soundproofing includes interventions like:
- Hang curtains/tapestries/blankets on the walls.
- Put up acoustic foam (like what podcasters use) if you're really desperate.
- Put down thick rugs/carpets.
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These all sound pretty reasonable! I'm willing to spend some money on this problem and would tolerate bad aesthetics for good performance, so I started looking into various acoustic foams/insulation.
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The standard performance measure for acoustic insulation is NRC (noise reduction coefficient), which measures the average sound absorption of the material. A low NRC means that the material reflects most of the sound energy back, while a high NRC means it doesn't.
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This sounded good to me but I couldn't find any mapping of NRC values to expected reductions in sound intensity (e.g., in decibels). 🤔 That seemed suspicious, and then I realized that that's because that comparison doesn't make any sense!
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Thinking back to wave mechanics, three things can happen to sound energy when it hits a new material: it can be reflected, absorbed, or transmitted.
(Image credit: Government of Wisconsin)
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I don't really care about how much sound is reflected: I want to know how much is transmitted! And NRC says nothing about that. Instead, there's another measure (STC. sound transmission class) that describes what I care about.
(Image credit: WorkingWalls workingwalls.com/nrc-and-stc-wh)
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Acoustic foams, carpets, tapestries, and so on all do a good job of reducing sound reflection in a room. This is useful if you're trying to record since it reduces the amount of reflection that the mic will pick up. It's also useful in echo-y spaces like gyms.
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None of those are good at reducing the amount of transmitted sound, though. The main thing that materials with high STC ratings have in common is that they're heavy: lots of mass to move means that lots of sound energy is expended moving the heavy thing, so less gets through.
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(There are a few techniques that go beyond that, like special glues that convert sound energy into heat, but in broad strokes, a high STC means that it's heavy.)
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I'm pretty sure that the standard advice for reducing noise in a bedroom should be "hang mass-loaded vinyl" (basically just vinyl impregnated with metals to make it heavy), not "put up tapestries". Unfortunately hanging heavy things is more difficult, expensive, and destructive.
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I am glad I noticed this, but it kinda worries me that so much standard advice (e.g., various web listicles, Reddit posts, etc.) is so confused, especially since figuring this out only required high school-level mechanics.
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And of course it worries me that I hadn't noticed this distinction before, and just sort of absorbed the advice that was "in the air" about what soundproofing is. It's kinda embarrassing that I'd never thought this through.
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One funny conclusion: this explains why sticking your head into a pillow to block out someone using a leafblower at 7:30am doesn't usually work.
A pillow probably has a pretty good NRC, but a low STC!
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Mostly I think that "soundproofing" and "sound absorption" are bad words that might mean two different things.
Straw proposal: materials like acoustic foam "block echos" while materials like concrete and mass-loaded vinyl "are hard for sound to get through".