With all the home zoom calls going on these days. Does anyone have any ideas to help soundproof my home office so my family does not have to listen to my zoom calls. Our home is new construction so the walls are thin and sound travels easily. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
Sound is REALLY hard to block/deaden well, unless you start the construction that way with that goal in mind.
Sound is a vibration, so you have two issues. You need to block the vibrations from escaping the room (roll an old towel or blanket and put it in the gap under your door, for example) and you can put different materials or surfaces of different densities between the sound source (you and your computer) and any walls. Hanging a blanket on a wall would help to muffle. Putting furniture in front of the wall may help some (to deflect and redirect the sound… make sure there is a small air gap between the furniture and the wall.
If you like a real project, you could apply a second layer of drywall on the wall in the room. (This implies finishing and repainting said wall.)
@PHolder thank you very much for the context. It is very cool to see that they have specific drywall for sound proofing. Any other tips like a sound machine or some gadget I can buy 
Well, you can use a sound machine to generate white/pink noise or other background noises. A fan could work as well. The issue would be that if you use it in the room, it may affect your conference calls, and if you use it outside the room, it may be more annoying for the very people you are trying to help. Google Home devices have a “relaxation” mode… you can ask it to play ocean or thunderstorm sounds. I don’t know if simple white noise is an option. There are wall socket mounting brackets for the Home/Nest Mini and you could plug it into the wall socket on the wall you’re trying to adapt and see if helped… I am unconvinced, but it would be a relatively cheap experiment.
ahh…good point on the goofing up my zoom calls if I add in white noise. back to the drawing board for me
ok…I went down the rabbit hole on this one…tons of videos and articles. Anyone have any real world experience with practical soundproofing suggestions to improve my home office for zoom calls? I do not need perfection…just decent suggestions that will make reasonable improvements
I have not done this, but have considered doing it in the past, as I feel it would be relatively effective and relatively cost effective:
I think if you got (or more likely built) some sort of metal (for strength) stand that was almost as high as the wall, and draped a heavy blanket, or two, over it, you’d generate blanket, air gap, blanket (the space in the middle the width of the metal support.) Put that near the wall, but not against it… that should muffle the noise a fair bit, for relatively cheap cost. The downside is that it’s not going to be very pretty.
They have soundproof blankets on Amazon. Not super cheap but if its just for 1 wall might not be to bad. Says they use them in recording studios.
Here are some cheaper ones that I found. Though I’m not an expert in this either.
Also you could try deflection methods to lower the amount of sound traveling and bothering others as well though that would be a little more cumbersome.
Some sort of a tall garment rack might work to hold the blankets, for example:
https://www.wayfair.com/storage-organization/pdp/honey-can-do-331-w-portable-garment-rack-hcd1002.html
Thank you very much, I will check these out