Getting Control of Sound | Hour 3

podcast is there. And where is that podcast found? Everywhere? I mean literally everywhere. Of course, you can listen to it on the free iHeartRadio app, but if you love Apple podcasts, we're there. If you love Spotify, we're there wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Just to go to the search window and put in Home with Dean Sharp, or you can put in Dean Sharp, or you can put in the House Whisper. I guarantee you we're coming up hundreds of episodes all waiting there for you that

you can listen to on demand anytime. It is truly truly a home improvement reference library at your fingertips. And if you're thinking, hey, this is all great, Dean, I am inspired, I'm informed. But what I really need is you and Tina standing in our house staring at the problem with us. Well, you can do that too. You can book an in home design consult with me and the tea. Just go to house whisperer dot Design. All right, we're going to return to our conversation on controlling sound. However,

I am going to finish Wendy's question. Wendy had a specific concern about as green as possible hardwood flooring, and I explain some things about hardwood flooring versus old school versus engineered flooring, and I understand there is a you know, have no doubt that modern engineered hardwood flooring is the best hardwood flooring ever in the history of mankind. Just know that, all right, the ware layers excellent, The base

and the structure underneath the best it's ever been. Yes, way better, you old schoolers, way better as far as a performing product than solid oak or maple or whatever have you. Three quarter inch solid oak or maple floors. Okay, period. The end, there there is no competition between the two because of the way that wood interacts with moisture. The end However, there is always a concern with some people of the adhesives that are put together in order to

form the plywood layers and so on. And Wendy had brought up one specific product, and I've got to say, I have not used this product yet for a client in a house. I know of it. I've heard things. I've heard good things and I've heard not so great things about the Casablanca collection by Alston Incorporated. They've come up with they what they call an an innovative revolutionary hardwood hybrid combination. It's a two ply engine two ply floor. Okay, and here I was saying, you want nine to eleven

plies underneath that to wear layer. They basically have the war layer and wood underneath it. How do they do it well, They basically build the bottom structure of the plank like a cabinet door. Essentially, there's a tongue in groove rail underneath and filler wood in between. And I can see how that would lend a certain amount of stability to the product. However, it is difficult for me

understanding that structure. Two, It's difficult for me to suggest that it is as stable as a multiply plywood floor. Just from the pure physics of it, I don't think it's true. I don't think it's as stable as a multiply plywood floor. However, the advantage there being they say that they use of completely formaldehyde free adhesives and zero VOC materials, making it a top eco friendly green product,

and that I believe. I believe that's the case. However, they are using a lot of solid wood underneath that, So there are different ways of evaluating green. If it comes down to chemicals and chemical off gassing, if that is where your definition for whatever reason of green is, then this would be near the top of a list. My definition of green extends to the entire manufacturing process, including how many trees and what kind of would it takes to produce any particular product, and that would put

this kind of in the middle of that list. And because there are multi layer plywoods that are also use low formaldehyde or zero formaldehyde and zero VOC materials, by the way, so that there it is just to keep my promise to Windy about that. By the way, anybody who is interested in finding those kinds of low off gasing products for them, here's a website that I recommend it's a great starting point. My chemical free house, My chemical freehouse dot net. Go to my Chemical freehouse dot net.

You'll find every classification of flooring material there and you'll get some input from them and some suggestions as to what's out there, what's available, and what to be looking for. So there you go. All right, Hopefully that satisfied that question in the limited amount of time that I had. Oh what are you doing? Oh? I see Keena's like, all of a sudden behind me. I'm like, what do you behind me for? She's watering Bob. Bob is our official in Bob is the name of our in studio plant.

And now I can hear him drinking. He's very happy that you're watering him. All right, let's get back to the conversation of controlling sound in your home.

about soundproofing. Here are a couple other insulation layers, and it's all a layering game. We've talked about mineral wool. We've talked about denim insulation. We've talked about open and closed cell foam insulation. Open cell foam when it comes to sound insulation does better than closed cell foam, and the opposite is true when it comes to energy. When

it comes with energy. When it comes to thermal energy, closed cell foam does a better job per inch of thickness than open cell phone when it comes to resisting heat or cooling. But the open cells, those air pockets inside open cell phone does a better job with sound. We talked about mass loaded vinyl. It's a great product. It's expensive, but it's a great product, especially when space to expand and thicken a wall is limited. But it's not a miracle product, even though it's displayed that way.

Here are other simple changes inside the house when it comes to insulating solid core doors on the inside of your house. Get rid of those hollow core builder graye doors that they put in and put in solid doors. Solid doors have mass. Mass is an insulator. Solid core doors will make rooms quieter. Dual glazed windows, it should go without saying. Most of us have them, now some of us don't. Still, dual glazed windows two windows with

a gaseous gap in between is an insulating pocket. Now, it's not as good as the wall next to it. It never will be. Well, I shouldn't say it never will be, because you know science. But right now, even the most expensive dual glaze window that you can get, the most high tech one, is not equivalent in our value or sound control to the solid wall next to it.

But they help. They help a lot. Because sound energy having to move through two panes of glass with a little bit of a disruptive air in between, and by the way, it's not air inside, it's ar gone gas in between those two clanes panes of glass, it has to work harder to get through, which means by the time it gets the inside, it is significantly weakened in its strength. Because sound is an energy game. Just remember that dual glazed windows, a double layered dry wall in

a house. If we're really looking to quiet a room down, and we're going to set aside budget to do it, then we can without having to build a separate wall inside a wall, which is literally recording studio kind of moves. Double layered drywall, another layer of drywall with decoupling kulk in between decoupling calk. We'll talk about that in a bit, but it is a specialized kind of calc in which

we don't screw the last layer of drywall on. We glue it on with a layer of calk that itself becomes a vibration dampener in between the layers of drywall, and then outside thick tree cover. Thick tree canopies doesn't sound proof a yard, but what it does sound Having to move through all of those leaves, all around all of those branches, it gets diffused and so it can definitely lessen the sound. There are sound blocks that can

be made out of trees. Yet another argument for Dean to tell you to plant trees in your yard you want a quieter yard of And we'll come back to trees when it comes to making the right kind of sound in a yard. But if you want to quiet noise tree canopies, big thing, block walls better than wood fences. Obviously, the sound has a harder time getting through a block

wall than a wood fence. But I don't make a big issue of you know, in order to quiet your yard down, you need to surround it with block walls. Because most of us don't have the right the allowance from the from the city to actually build an eight or a ten foot tall block wall around our backyard. There are there are height restrictions to block walls, and if you if you're zoning in your area only allows

you to build a six foot tall block wall. Remember what I said about air, air goes right over the top, and so the difference in cost of your block wall to your wood fence. Believe me, you're not going to notice that big of a difference in sound deadening. However, just saying block walls do a better job of insulating you from sound waves than wood fences. The end air ceiling when it comes to your house air ceiling. As I've said, sound travels on air. When air gets inside,

then sound comes with it. Hence that whole mass loaded vinyl demonstration that I told you about where they make this cube out of mass loaded vinyl and they set it over a speaker and it just goes silent. Well, that's the real trick there is. Yes, mass loaded vinyl is a great sound insulating product, but the real trick is the fact that they've cut off all the airflow from that speaker chamber out into the room where you are.

If we were to take the mass loaded vinyl cube and if I was to drill a half inch hole, just one hole in it, believe me, you would hear what's going on inside there. It would be quieter, but it wouldn't be that silent, dramatic thing. So what does that tell you? That tells you that air leakage around your house. You've got bad threshold underneath your front door. Can you see daylight? Can you feel a draft coming through the back patio door. Those aren't just air leaks.

Those are sound leaks into your house because with the air comes the sound. So there are weather just basic weather stripping. Improve the weather stripping around your doors and windows. Acoustic culk Okay, that's a thing. You can use acoustic culk to caulk around leaky windows, the edges of doors, what have you. Just know, the more air that comes into your house, the more sound that comes into your house. That's just science. Okay, So now I want to cross

over and top that's insulating, insulating, and air ceiling. That's what we've covered so far. Now I want to talk about something else I had teased at the beginning of the show, which is decoupling. And know that doesn't mean you breaking up with your significant other. I mean, which, by the way, it might make your house quieter, but that's not the kind of sound reduction I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is breaking what we call bridges and I'm using my air quotes here, the bridges that conduct energy from one side of it to the other, the bridges, and in technical sound isolation and attenuation and insulation concerns, we call it decoupling, breaking the sound bridge. If you remember that energy is what sound is, it's energy, okay, traveling.

Then energy travels through a medium, Okay, in order to get from point A to point B. It travels through a medium like, for instance, electricity in a wire, in a copper wire, copper metal is a fantastic conductor of energy. In other words, it carries energy straight on through it.

Rubber is a terrible conductor of energy, which is why the insulation on the outside of an electrical wire is a rubberized insulation, which means you can actually touch the insulation when there's current running through the copper and not get shocked, which means the energy doesn't travel through it. Okay, you've follown me, all right. So when we come back, we're going to talk about bridges, like a wire from one side to another, from a switch to a light.

We're going to talk about things that bridge energy and allow sound to get from one place to a next. And there are things that we can look at, things that we can do to decouple to basically break the bridge. Imagine a drawbridge that goes up and all of a sudden separates. Now the traffic, you know. We do that so that a big ship can get under the bridge right pass through, but while it's up, the traffic can't go from one side to the other. We have decoupled

that bridge. We'll talk about that and the stuff in your house that is actually bridging sound into a room when we return.

and the construction side. And we're talking about reducing the amount of noise and noise pollution that makes its way into your house. So I want to talk about decoupling. This is a term, it's a technical term, and it means breaking a bridge of conductivity from one form of energy crossing over from one place to another. Let me ask you this, just to make the illustration as simple

as possible. Why can you connect two tin cans together with a piece of string and pull that string tight and make a actual, really functioning, rudimentary telephone out of it? Why does that work? It's very simple. It's because the metal of the tin cans is a very conductive material.

It allows energy to pass through it very easily. Sound is energy, and the tight string carries with it, just like a guitar string or a piano string carries with it a bridge of energy of that sound energy out of one can through the string and to the other. And how does do kids who think that this is a magical thing. What's the big mistake they make? They decide, oh, let's make it go around a corner. So they pull the string tight around a corner. But guess what the

corner is doing. It's decoupling, it is getting it. It's not allowing the energy to pass around the corner because the string isn't that good. It's not that good, so it needs that vibration, and that dampens the vibration. Right. So this is the kind of stuff we're talking about when we're talking about breaking bridges and you're like, where

are these bridges, Dean, Well, they're all around you. Actually, a bridge for sound energy is actually anything that is solid, even wood, Okay, Like even the string carries vibration through it. And even though wood is not a great conductor of electrical energy, you know what, you can send vibrations through it, right, And if you put your ear to it, to one side of a two by four and I tap on the other side with a hammer, you're going to hear it right come through. So how do we break the

bridges down? Well, one thing that we talked about early on was the idea of you could build a double wall, one wall out here and then another let's say two by four wall right next to it, not touching though they can't touch. That air gap in between the two is critical. Why because the vibration traveling through the one wood wall has to not have an opportunity to jump to the other one as easily. That's why we need

the air gap in between. And you think, well, I don't have room in my house Dean to build double walls everywhere because the rooms get really small. Absolutely, I totally agree with you. Another way, another step in reducing that is you could build what we call a staggered stud wall. Imagine not a double two by four wall, but a single two by six wall. You use a two by six bottom plate and a two by six

top plate, but you use two by four studs. Stagger one set of studs on one side, staggered with studs on the other side. The studs aren't touching. Every other stud is on one side of the wall or the other. And what we've done is we've created a double wall using one wall plate. Mm hmmm hmm. You see what's going on there, all right, But yet there are other ways of just keeping your normal walls, and that is

the drywall. The drywall that goes on the wall could be set in a way that we call sound reducing by using resilient channels, which we use metal horizontal channels traveling across the studs from top to bottom at regular intervals, and then we mount the drywall to those channels. Now, what's the secret there. Those channels have little rubber isolating gaskets so that when the sound hits the drywall number one, it's not directly attached to the wood stud so it

doesn't transfer the vibration straight through. It does transfer the vibvibration into the metal channel, but the metal channel has little rubber bumpers for lack of a less more technical term, little rubber bumpers that dampen the vibration as it moves from the channel to the studs and so on. So that's another way. What if we want to do that, well, we put on a layer of drywall, maybe we use

quiet rock drywall. What is that? Uh huh? It is sound reducing drywall, same thickness as regular drywall, comes in five eighths and also half inch. But what it actually is is like a a half inch drywall is two quarter inch thick pieces of drywall that have been sandwiched together with a Visco elastic polymer in between. What is it like a vinyl rubberized gasket in between two layers

of drywall. So sound reducing drywall decouples the vibration moving through the one quarter inch and then it gets to that rubberized layer, and it that rubberized layer reduces the amount of vibration that gets into the other layer, and therefore it is sound reducing drywall. You could put two layers of that on your wall. You could put two layers of sound reducing drywall with stuck together with Visco

elastic caulking in between the two. You could put two sound reducing drywall layers with metal a resilient channel and the little rubber dampening things that I was just telling you about. You see, and every time we do it, every time we go a little further and a little further and a little further, we are bridging. We're breaking bridges that conduct energy. We're breaking the bridge. We're breaking the bridge. We're making it harder and harder and harder

for the energy wave to make it through. And if we are breaking up the ability of the energy wave to bridge through a material, we are reducing the amount of sound sound as energy that comes to the other side, and therefore we're reducing sound. There it is, you understand,

sound reducing windows work the exact same way. A sound reducing window is not a triple glazed window per se in the traditional thermal sense, but it is in one sense because it's a dual glazed window, but the outside glass is actually two two thinner layers of glass with one of those secret viscoelastic polymers a sandwiched between the two. So they're doing what the dry wall that I was

just describing to you does. And as a result, Yeah, there's a lot less sound transmission, not soundproof, just reduced sound transmission. Okay, that's all the insulating and the air ceiling and the decoupling. Okay, when we return, let's talk about what we do with the sound that is with us. Sound absorption inside a room is different than proofing of

the sound from getting in. What do we do with those sound that's already inside a room, for a home theater or for just an echoe room, how do we keep it from sounding so weird and hollow and echoing in here? And then let's talk about outside a little bit sound masking all of that noise from town that's making its way in. How can we let go of that. We'll do all of that when we return, but first.

after we go off the air. All right, sound absorption, that's what we talk about when we're acoustically treating sound inside a room, not soundproofing it from what's coming in.

But once the sound that's in there. This studio is a great example of treating the room, because when there are too many reflective surfaces in a room, what happens is that energy wave which comes out, let's say, out of my melodious throat, so clear and resonant, it bounces off the wall directly across from me, and then the ceiling and then the floor, and then all of these

things start bouncing into each other. And if we were to look at that nice, clean, arcing energy wave, suddenly we would find it's been fragmented and it's overlaid, and it's very fuzzy, and the sound loses its quality. So sound absorption in a room is very simple in one sense. It's complex in another sense. Of your building a studio specifically for recording or li but a normal room, it's

really about soft surfaces, non reflective furnishings. And if you really need something like in a home theater, then you add acoustic panels, meaning something that absorbs some that diffuse. But essentially we're talking about filling up a house with soft surfaces and non reflective furnishings. Why because the sound waves hit those, you hit the sofa, and whereas when the room was empty, it hit those hard reflective walls

and it bounced right back it hits the sofa. Some of us is absorbed because the sofa is mass, and some of it is diffused because the sofa is soft and round. And that's how it works. When it comes to outside. You can't get the outside noise of the town from coming into your yard, no matter how hard

you try. Now you can put up nice big tree canopies to diffuse it, but really the goal of outside and how I approach this with clients is masking sound masking, which means we take the sound of traffic and which is coming over the top of the house and around in the sides, and we put a water feature in the middle of the yard. The water feature. It just so happens that the sound of moving water are ninety percent of the same frequencies as the sound of traffic.

And so what I've done is I've blended the two together. And now I've given you a visual queue to look at in the yard. You see the water running, and so what does it tell your brain? Everything that you're hearing in that frequency range is in fact the water even though half of it might technically be the traffic, but your brain interprets it as moving water. If you get to see moving water. Therefore, your brain does not react stressfully to that sound. It reacts by destressing. Isn't

that brilliant? That is some serious sound control magic. In addition to that, you add wind chimes outdoor speakers to control the music environment. Pastoral sounds like chickens and goats and horses and cows and all of this. These are non threatening, relaxing sounds. Remember I said at the very beginning of the show soundproofing total silence not our goal anymore. And this is something we've learned. I've talked about this before,

but I will say it again. We have learned that absolute silence is not the least stressful amount of sound in a life. In fact, there are studies that show that people who sit in rooms with absolute silence in other words, sound absorbing rooms completely soundproof people can only hang in there for so long before they start going a little bit, you know, nutty, and they got to get out. You get in a room that quiet, you start hearing the beating of your own heart, and that,

you know, can be interesting for a while. But for most normal people it gets a little unnerving. So here's the thing. Evolutionarily speaking, we've spent the last two million years or so hanging outside, living in an outside environment, and what's really programmed into our software is the fact that when you wake up in the morning and you walk outside, bird song in the air, the sound of the wind moving through leaves, okay, and moving water, these are all signals to you that all is well in

the world. Okay. Birds, you know, they don't give off their position when there's danger nearby. If there's fire nearby, they go quiet. If there are predators nearby, they go quiet. So really, you can make the evolutionary argument that silence, total silence is actually perceived by most human beings as a threat state and a stressful state. What is the most relaxing state open air, moving water, gentle breeze, and

bird song. And so for those of you who are saying I'm frustrated because there's no way I'm gonna soundproof my backyard, you don't have to plant some more trees, break out the bird feeder, get a little fountain going, sit out there, enjoy and watch your blood pressure drop. Sound masking not soundproofing when it comes to the backyard. All right, I am literally right at the edge of our time today it has breezed by, as it always does.

I appreciate you so much for being with me. I hope that this lesson on sound control for your home is of great benefit to you. Don't forget. We are doing special coverage of the situation in Iran and the protests downtown starting in just a couple of minutes, and we will be doing that throughout the afternoon. So if you need to be updated on that, go nowhere. I'm

going to leave you with this quick thought today. One of the most interesting parts of being perceived as an expert or an authority on some subject is the influence to give other people permission. I'm often told by our design clients and our listeners how important it was for them that I gave them permission for something, permission to design your home to your life, or permission to be bold or be brave or unique or be an individual. And I know how important that is in my own life.

I live with somebody who every day gives me permission to be fully, unapologetically me. Thank you, Tina, and also I'm sorry for that the very fact that I'm taking valuable radio time at the end of the show to share personal thoughts and feelings is because years ago, my brilliant program director and radio mentor gave me permission to be one hundred percent me when I am spending time with you. So getting permission from those that we love or respect, or love and respect it can be life changing.

And I'm certainly not in charge of you or your home. But if you're listening for permission, then let me give it to you here. It is pursue your passion, discover your joy, live your life on your terms. You do you, and then get out there and get busy building yourself a beautiful life. Guys, have a great, great rest of your weekend and a great week lying ahead. I will wave to you this week from the Eastern Sierras, and we will see you right back here next weekend. This

has been Home with Dean Sharp the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI Am six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeart Radio app.