How Can You Soundproof A Room For Voice Recording?

Nothing can kill a video like an inferior audio quality. No amount of camera effects, set design, or lighting tricks will assist your finished video if your audio sounds like an old cassette tape.

Apart from appearing unprofessional, inferior audio quality makes it hard for your viewers to understand the video.
Obviously, some types of videos are less driven by audio than others. I can think some great videos that don’t have any speaking parts at all! However, for anything with on-screen dialog, voiceover, or interview, you will want to ensure the sound quality is as good as possible.

Before we discuss about how to soundproof a room, let us take a quick look at how sound works in the first place. Once we realize what makes a voice recording scratchy, we can commence fixing the issue.
The science that works behind sound

Sound moves in waves. When those waves hit something like a wall, they bounce back. If you are in a room with more than a single wall, the sound wave will bounce back and forth repeatedly. As you may imagine, sound bouncing back and forth across a room doesn’t make for the best quality audio.
To fix the issue, we have two options. One is to diffuse them or to absorb the reflected waves. Absorbing the sound waves lessen the strength of reflection. Absorbing all the sound waves might appear a great idea, but if you absorb too much, your recording will start your feeling lifeless or unnatural.

This is where diffusion comes into play. Diffusion is just another word for scattering, sending reflected waves in various directions has a smoothing effect. To get the best audio, use diffusion and absorption together.

Common myths about soundproofing

Until this point, we have been discussing how to make the audio within a room sound better. Diffusion and absorption only assist with reverberations, dampening the noise in a space. Though many people refer to this process as soundproofing, what we have actually been discussing is acoustics. On the contrary, soundproofing is how you block external noise from entering the room in the first place.
Dampening sound within the room

Soft materials absorb sound waves better than hard materials and surfaces with many angles that diffuse sound waves. Put these concepts together and it is pretty evident why most of the recording studios are covered in sound dampening foam with many angles.

Things you should try

If you are tight on budget, try putting a blanket over the microphone and your head. Small spaces have a tendency to not require as much diffusion as bigger spaces, but if your audio plays back sounding dull, throw some corners into the room. Moreover, acoustic ceiling panels work well, but anything with some angles on it will do the job.