How do I make a room quieter?

Two different problems get called soundproofing. Stopping sound entering or leaving a room needs mass and airtightness. Reducing echo inside a room needs soft absorbent surfaces. The materials sold for one rarely help the other.

What you'll need

• Draught excluders
• Heavy curtains
• Acoustic sealant (optional)
• Rugs and soft furnishings (optional)

Step by step

1. Work out which problem you have.Noise coming through walls, floors or doors needs mass and sealing. A room that echoes needs soft absorbent surfaces. They are different jobs.
2. Seal the air gaps first.Under and around doors, around pipe and cable penetrations, around window frames. Sound travels through air, and a gap defeats any amount of insulation.
3. Fit a solid door and a draught excluder.Hollow internal doors transmit sound readily. A solid core door with a brush seal and a threshold seal makes a substantial difference.
4. Add mass to walls if the problem is neighbours.Additional layers of dense plasterboard on resilient bars is the effective approach. Foam panels do essentially nothing for this.
5. Deal with floors for impact noise.Footsteps and dropped objects travel as vibration. Thick underlay, carpet and rugs are far more effective than anything applied to the ceiling below.
6. Use heavy curtains and soft furnishings.They absorb sound within the room and reduce echo. A bare room with hard surfaces sounds far louder than a furnished one.
7. Consider secondary glazing for traffic noise.An independent inner window with a substantial air gap is considerably more effective for noise than replacing the glazing.
8. Be realistic about what is achievable.Meaningful reduction between rooms usually requires construction work. Sealing and soft furnishings help; they do not make a room soundproof.

Tips

• Bookshelves filled with books against a party wall add real mass and absorb sound, and cost nothing if you already own the books.
• White noise or a fan can be more effective and far cheaper than construction, because it masks intrusive sound rather than blocking it.
• Identify where the sound is actually coming in before spending anything. It is frequently a door or a vent rather than the wall.

Common mistakes

• Buying foam acoustic panels to block noise from neighbours — They absorb echo within a room. They do almost nothing to stop sound passing through a wall, which is what people buy them for.
• Insulating a wall while leaving gaps around the door — Sound travels through air. An unsealed gap undoes the benefit of anything you added to the wall.
• Treating impact noise from above with ceiling treatment — Footstep noise is vibration through the structure. Soft flooring in the room above is far more effective.

Questions people ask