Most people you know may get pretty excited to celebrate the 4th of July and New Year’s – you’ve got your cookouts, parties, firework shows, and and all around good time with friends and family! Unfortunately, not everyone has the same feelings towards the holiday. For some, firework shows are something to prepare for, but not by purchasing fireworks: by figuring out how to best soundproof from them. With the 4th of July being about a week away, it’s important to figure out which soundproofing methods work best for you and to plan accordingly.

There are a number of reasons that people may want to soundproof their home from fireworks. For example, a lot of veterans with PTSD don’t enjoy fireworks, and neither do people who experience sensory overload. Some people may be more concerned for their pets, especially because they have such sensitive ears. Or even simpler, you may just want a good night’s sleep with no disruptions.

Soundproofing Your Home from Fireworks

how to soundproof a house — People and pets alike may not enjoy the sound of fireworks. Luckily there are some steps you can take to soundproof from firework noise in your home.

As we know, fireworks are very loud. If you were to look at a common decibel chart comparing real-life noises to their actual decibel level, fireworks are usually the highest on the chart. If you’ve ever watched a firework show, you’ve probably noticed that, similar to lightning, you see the firework explode before you hear it. This means that the sound of a firework can travel pretty far, and still remain fairly loud.

Although fireworks are extremely loud, you can take some steps to mitigate the noise:

Install Soundproofing Curtains
Wear Noise Cancelling Headphones
Use Sound Machines

Keeping a Quiet Home During Firework Shows

While fireworks only occur 2-3 times a year, if you deal with other exterior noises, it may be worth it to consider soundproof curtains for your home. In general, noise typically leaks into homes through windows, and this is especially true with traffic noise, conversations, barking dogs and music. With fireworks, since the sound is just so loud, it may also be leaking in through the exterior doors and walls.

Soundproofing curtains are made using a mass loaded vinyl core, which is a material commonly used in commercial soundproofing projects for improving the sound blocking abilities of a wall. On their own, soundproof curtains have an STC of 21, and can block around 21-25 decibels of sound.

As mentioned above, fireworks are already extremely loud, so even though the curtains may help to reduce the amount of noise you hear from them, they’ll still seem very loud. For this reason, we do recommend pairing the soundproofing curtains with other products to more significantly soundproof from fireworks.

Protect Your Hearing from Firework Noise

If soundproof curtains don’t work well enough on their own for you, or if it’s outside your soundproofing budget to treat every window in your house, you can also consider a good pair of noise cancelling headphones to soundproof from fireworks. These should work especially well if you suffer from PTSD, or experience sensory overload when it comes to very loud, irregular noises.

Noise cancelling headphones don’t simply work by covering your entire ear, they use a function known as active noise cancelling to mask outside noise as well. This is how companies are also able to produce noise cancelling over the head-headphones as well as noise cancelling ear buds.

Active noise cancelling headphones work by sending cancelling incoming soundwaves by generating signals that are the inverse of the incoming wave. The headphones use microphones to detect incoming sound in the environment, and then generate the inverse wave. The peaks of the incoming soundwave are cancelled by generated valleys, and the sound is no longer perceptible to our hearing.
Advanced Hearing Solutions

Depending on the quality of the noise cancelling headphones, they can reduce the amount of outside noise you hear by 45 decibels. The video below is extremely helpful in understanding the science behind noise cancelling headphones, especially for visual learners.

Mask Sound of Fireworks in the Distance

Unlike noise cancelling headphones, a white noise machine won’t be intense enough to mask the noise of a firework show right near your house. White noise machines are meant to cover background noise such as background conversation. Because of this, they may be loud enough to reduce what noise you hear from firework shows in the distance.

A noise machine can be especially helpful for helping to avoid being kept awake by people lighting fireworks late into the night. Like we said above, if the noise of the sound machine is higher than the noise level from distant fireworks, you shouldn’t hear them, and you should be able to get a good night’s sleep.