This further weakening results from scattering and absorption. Natural materials, however, all produce an effect which further weakens the sound. In idealized materials, sound pressure (signal amplitude) is only reduced by the spreading of the wave. “When sound travels through a medium, its intensity diminishes with distance. Your explanation of sound insulation is incorrect … when it comes to sound, what matters is how much the energy of a sound wave is attenuated when passing through a material.įrom NDT (yes, this site concerns ultrasonics but the basics apply to everyday frequencies): Voila, noise suppression 101, and straw bales as soundproofing options work so well! Want to learn more about straw bale houses and how to build one? Want to do so for FREE? Sign up for our totally free 16-Day Straw Bale eCourse! Find out more HERE. They can’t do that, and so end up absorbed in the bales. In order for the sound waves to escape the soft bales, they would have to accelerate to get into the hard plaster skin. The outer plaster skin is hard and dense and so the sound waves move through it at high speeds however, when they hit the bales, the sound waves slow down. When it travels in soft material, the wavelength increases and slows down. When it moves through hard material, it travels in fast, short waves. Although not as good as an entire house of straw, they still work really well to eliminate sound. You can build a straw bale house or consider building a straw bale landscape wall. If you live on a very loud street or perhaps you back to an interstate, these walls will eliminate almost all of the noise that you currently live with. Yes, straw bale buildings are incredible insulators of sound. Without those, they would have to walk over to a window opening and reach their heads out to communicate with each other. I guarantee it! In fact, when my crew would work on straightening walls after they were all stacked, they would often use walkie-talkies to communicate with the person on the other side of the wall. That would never happen in a straw bale house. The walls are insulated, by the way, but even still, they are easy to talk through. What a sorry state of affairs it is when we can actually talk through our walls. We both laughed when we realized we had just had a clear conversation, with no difficulty hearing each other, right through the wall of our house! Without leaving my bed, I said, “You have to lift the gate up and push it towards the house while you latch it.” She thanked me for the input, latched the gate, and came inside. She did, and when she got there, I could hear she was having trouble getting it to latch. My wife was still awake and so I asked her if she could go outside and close the gate. The gate is attached directly to the side of the house we’re currently renting (no, it’s NOT straw bale, and thus the funny story). Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, the outside gate was swinging and banging in the wind. I have responded to a lot of you individually, but I figure it’s better to give everyone this information as well. Many of you have written to me in recent months asking about straw bales as soundproofing options against noisy streets and neighborhoods.
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