Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My experiment is set up as a box measuring about 2.5 feet on each side. The box is a foot and a half tall. the walls have been replaced with two strips of chicken wire per side so that different materials could be placed inside the walls to test their soundproofing quality. Is it necessary to have a top on the box as well? The amp which the sound source will be is going to sit about a foot away from the wall of the box that is being tested. Could sound get through the open top of the box in large quantities? If so I was thinking about creating a lid similar to the walls, cover the entire thing with chicken wire and just place the tested material on to the top.

any other opinions would rock.

thanks

Is it necessary to have a top on the box as well?

I hope you appreciate that sounds travel as waves through air and other materials and will reflect off room walls, floors, and ceilings . If you want to test the sound proofing characteristics of a material by itself, not only do you need to put the same material on the top and all sides, you also need to provide some means of decoupling between the floor and your "test box", and then you need to put the same material on the floor as well. Alternatively, you could construct a test setup where you use extremely good sound proofing materials on 5 of the six sides and only place the test material on the sixth. You would have to run a control using the same material on all sides, then as long as the other test materials perform significantly worse than your control, you have an adequate test setup. If any test material performs better or about the same as the control material, you end up proving that you don't have an adequate test setup and you have to come up with a different test setup. This means the easiest way to perform your experiment will be to use the test material on all six sides.

Have you tried looking at the soundproofing forum site, there are huge amounts of info on soundproofing there.

http://soundproofingforum.co.uk/