Acoustic insulation
Functioning comfort in a given room is not only about good design and finishing, but also about guaranteeing all comforts, including ensuring comfort in it, or good sound insulation.
is sound insulation important?
Providing comfort in a particular room is extremely important. We want to maintain our privacy while not hearing what the neighbors are doing behind the wall. And it's not about loud parties or yelling behind the wall, but there are strict standards that define the acceptable noise level in living spaces, which can be found in the Polish Construction Acoustics Standard PN-B-02151-5:2017-10. These standards strictly define the level of noise that can come from the outside of the building, but also the level of impact sounds that reach the apartments from the cage, or from neighboring apartments.
why do we hear neighbors' conversations?
If we can hear our neighbors' conversations from behind the wall, it means that the acoustics of our apartment are very bad. Sound can pass not only through walls that simply have too little sound insulation, which can be reinforced, for example, with rock wool, but noise can also pass through ceilings. And this is already a bigger problem. It is often due to construction errors made at the very design level, because the acoustic insulation of the rooms was not taken into account at a sufficient level.
This often happens when, for example, the floor is not separated from the walls. Particularly in multi-family, terraced buildings, the floor is poured one in all apartments, and all the walls are founded on it. Then the acoustics of such apartments is very bad.
How to properly design a building so that there is good sound insulation?
In order for sound insulation to fulfill its purpose, it is certainly important to choose the right type of ceiling. Monolithic reinforced concrete ceilings are considered to be the best for insulating impact sounds. Also used are dense ribbed ceilings or hollow block infill with a layer of over concrete, but this may not be sufficient. Then the insulation should be improved, for example, using floating floor, which will be supplemented with polystyrene foam.
how to soundproof interiors?
If we want to create an ideal room in our apartment for ourselves to watch movies or listen to music, it is a good idea to soundproof the room so that the sound does not bounce off the walls, the so-called echo. If we use rough surfaces, soft materials, the sound will be absorbed or muffled by them. This results in a restriction of sound propagation in the room.
can the room be too quiet?
In addition to the fact that, for our comfort, we need to ensure that the room is not too loud, on the other hand, it should be remembered that it also cannot be too quiet. The human ear controls balance and picks up any sounds from the environment. If we deprive our mind of registering any sounds from the environment, it will become unnatural to it and it may stop orienting itself in space. That is, excessive acoustic isolation can be detrimental to our hearing and balance.
