Sound Poofing
By Peter Lu and Kyle Wong
Intermediate Category (Grades 9-10)
Experiment | Physics
Sound is everywhere in this world. Although we hear pleasant sounds such as music, we can also hear unpleasant sounds such as ones coming from a fridge. Unfortunately in the present, there are a lot of these annoying sounds because humans have made so many technologies that go tick, beep and bop.
In Canada, 33% percent of Canadians don’t get enough sleep, and in that 33%, 54% of people didn’t get enough sleep due to noise from their home appliances and vehicle sounds according to CTV News. In the end, humans did find an alternative to this sound problem, but they are very expensive, inconvenient and hard to set up. We will explore whether cotton, sponge, rubber, wood or clay is the best at soundproofing. We will be also testing the materials in different shapes to compare the wedge shape to the flat shape to see if shapes assist the materials in sound absorption. These materials will be glued on to a cardboard panel and will be sild onto all six sides of a cardboard box, then a phone would be placed inside while it is ringing. The sound will then be detected (in dB) by my Q8 recorder microphone, and the result would be recorded by a mac. These would all be completed in a quiet room. The experiment that we are conducting, will explore which material common amongst homes are the best for absorbing sound and which shape is the best at assisting sound absorption.
