Many of us have fallen in love with great rooms and open concept design. While this look allows light to travel all through your home, it also lets sound bounce around. Depending on the surfaces in your home, that sound bounce can be disruptive and may even make it hard to speak to someone in another room.
Sound Dampening As Art
A simple way to reduce sound bounce around your home is to add texture to the walls. This can be as simple as buying some felt pixel art or adding framed art. It is important to note that you can also add DIY sound dampening panels inside the open back of an artistic canvas.
If you have the skills to decorate raw canvas frames, adding foam to the back will be easy. You can create this same effect on a flat panel with fabric and felt. For very little money, some sturdy cardboard, a pretty piece of fabric and a black piece of felt, you can create silhouette art of almost any shape, decorate your home and make your space a little quieter.
Another option to transform your room and improve your acoustics with felt is to purchase peel and stick panels for your home or classroom. These panels are available in a variety of colors and pressed patterns. You can use the panels whole or cut them up to create custom patterns.
Easy On Your Ears, Easy On The Earth
Felt used to be created with fresh wool, pressure and time. Modern semi-rigid PET felt is durable, less likely to lose compaction and available in a wide variety of colors. Depending on where you install it, this product can be applied in a subtle pattern to allow architectural acoustic wall texture to create a unique display across walls of enormous size.
This unparalleled sound quality and design flexibility is particularly useful in the age of polished concrete. Whether your home, condo or place of business has terrazzo dyed and polished concrete on the floor, custom patterned felt wall sound dampening panels make improving the sound quality while cutting down on the noise level easier, no matter the flooring in the space.
Warm Things Up
It's important to note that this isn't just a 21st century problem. The tapestries of the middle ages were lovely and very useful for sharing the history of the family, but they also cut down on drafts and made it much easier to keep from freezing to death in a big, cold castle. For quite a while in European history, rushes went on the floor to freshen the air and carpets hung on the wall for display and warmth.
A simple way to warm up children's rooms and improve your acoustics is by mounting nursery art on felt or purchasing one of many self sticking felt pixel art designs. Create a felt board of bright colors over a piece of polystyrene or cork and leave a frame in the center open. As your child increases their artistic skills, put their work in the center of this felt panel.
A polystyrene felt panel will weigh next to nothing. You can wrap it in craft felt, glue or tape the corners, and push a million pins into the front before you have to re-wrap it or create another one. Color changes will be easy to manage thanks to the wide variety of felts available on the bolt in a craft store, and you can add peel and stick acoustic felt to the space as your child grows.
Many of us didn't realize how much sound carried around our homes until we were all sheltering in place. By managing sound bounce in your home, you can also create pockets of privacy for everyone who's struggling to relax or to work in the space. Felt panels can easily add both beauty and flexibility to your home, office or classroom.
