Posted by Rick Denney on August 17, 2000 at 11:49:25:
Night before last, at 9:20 PM, my doorbell rings. It's my neighbor from across the street, whose wife dispatched him to get me to stop playing. They have an infant, and she can hear me in their bedroom. They've complained a couple times before, but in the past it's always been later in the evening and the request has been a little easier to take.
(Our houses are in a typical suburb, but they are not really that close together. Their house is over 100 feet away.)
Given my fiancee can sleep without trouble in the upstairs bedroom while I play, I wonder if the neighbor is being a trifle over-sensitive. But it will do me no good to say so; I don't want a war. One thing is for sure: With my work schedule, if I can't play after 9PM, I can't play very often at all. And given their infant is young enough to be sleeping almost all the time, my playing will bother them even when they are unwilling to complain about it.
I have been playing in a front room in the house, and I've assumed that the problem is the thin wall, constructed of Kleenex and spit, that separates my music room from the street. So, I banished the tubas to the basement. After a couple days of work, I now have a nice, well-lit sitting area with a large, soft rug in my otherwise unfinished basement. I put the finishing touches on it last night, and asked my fiancee to go outside and hear what she could hear while I played.
It was just as loud as before.
I don't get it. I'm in a basement with 6-inch solid concrete walls, all but a couple of feet of which is below ground level. The ceiling of the basement is the typical exposed floor joists, terminating in a band joist which is two inches thick of laminated "wood products," and insulated with fiberglass batting. Yet the sound is clear even in the neighbor's driveway.
So, now the task is to cheaply and quickly soundproof the basement area, and I need ideas. I'm sure this is not an uncommon problem. I'm assuming that the concrete walls aren't the problem, and that the sound is being carried by the floor structure out the side of the house. I've thought of temporarily stapling acoustic ceiling tiles to the underside the joists to try and keep the sound out of the floor. Has anybody else tried this? Did it work? Is there something easier and more obvious?
Rick "Seemingly sole proponent of 'Live and let live'" Denney