RoomTone Scan Results Score: 41/100 | Bass: Moderate | Echo: Moderate-High | Voice Clarity: Fair | Outside Noise: Present
This one comes up differently than the other rooms we scan. People don't describe their bedroom as "loud." They describe it as restless. Hard to fall asleep in. A place where every noise — a partner shifting in bed, traffic outside, the refrigerator cycling on two rooms away — seems more present than it should.
The scan tells you what's happening acoustically. This room scored 41 out of 100. What the number captures is the combination of two separate problems: noise coming in from outside the room, and sound echoing inside the room before it dies out.
Those two problems have different causes. Fortunately, they share some solutions.
What the Scan Found
Outside noise intrusion. The app detected sound signatures consistent with exterior noise entering the room — traffic, ambient neighborhood sound, possibly an HVAC system on the exterior wall. Thin curtains over a single-pane window account for most of this. Glass is a weak link acoustically, and bare glass is weaker still.
Internal echo extending sounds. Inside the room, sound takes longer than it should to decay. Wood floors, minimal furniture, thin curtains — there isn't enough absorption to bring sounds to rest quickly. When a car passes outside, you hear not just the car but its echo inside the room a half-second afterward. When someone coughs in the night, the sound lingers. This is part of why sleep feels light here.
Shared wall sensitivity. The room shares a wall with an adjacent space (in this case, the hallway and bathroom). Bass frequencies from the other side of that wall were detectable in the scan. This is structural — no amount of surface treatment will fully solve it — but the right placement of furniture can meaningfully reduce how much you perceive it.
The Three Fixes
1. Heavy Blackout Curtains (highest impact for outside noise)
Thin curtains are doing almost nothing acoustically. They're blocking light but not sound, and the gap between the curtain and the window means even that light-blocking is partial.
Heavy blackout curtains — ideally floor-to-ceiling, mounted as close to the ceiling as possible and extending wider than the window frame on both sides — do several things at once:
- They add meaningful mass between you and the window, which reduces how much sound passes through
- They trap a layer of air between the fabric and the glass, which adds insulation
- They eliminate the light that reinforces wakefulness and makes sleep harder to achieve
This is the fix with the clearest double benefit: you sleep better immediately because the room is darker, and you notice the sound reduction within the first few nights.
What to look for: Heavy, lined curtains — the lining is what does the work. Floor-to-ceiling length, extending 6+ inches beyond the window frame on each side.
Recommended: West Elm Linen Blackout Curtains [affiliate link] — substantial weight, available in multiple widths, good for rooms where aesthetics matter as much as function.
Budget option: Amazon Blackout Curtains [affiliate link] — thermal-lined, functional, less expensive, works just as well acoustically.
2. An Area Rug Under the Bed (medium-high impact)
Wood floors are major acoustic reflectors. In a bedroom, the largest floor area is often under and around the bed — which is also the area where you're spending the most sensitive hours of your day.
A large rug under the bed (8x10 is standard for a queen bed with room on both sides) absorbs sound from below and significantly reduces the "liveness" of the room overall. It won't stop outside noise, but it will shorten how long every sound inside the room lingers — which is the part that makes a bedroom feel restless even when it's quiet.
What to look for: Dense pile over thin. A rug pad adds acoustic benefit — it keeps the rug from sliding and adds another absorptive layer between the rug and the floor.
Recommended: Washable Area Rug (Amazon) [affiliate link] — dense, holds its position, machine washable for practical longevity.
3. Bookshelves on the Shared Wall (medium impact for bass transmission)
The shared wall between this bedroom and the hallway is the entry point for bass frequencies from the other side. The physics of bass transmission through drywall are difficult to address with surface treatment alone — but you can reduce how much you perceive it.
A bookshelf — ideally a tall, dense one — placed against the shared wall adds mass and diffusion on your side. It won't block sound from coming through the wall, but the combination of mass (the bookshelf itself), irregular surface (books at varying depths), and absorption (the books themselves) reduces how much of that transmitted sound bounces back at you as echo inside the room.
This is the fix with the most modest impact of the three, but in rooms where the shared wall is the primary irritant, it makes a real difference.
What to look for: A tall bookshelf with substantial depth, filled with books or objects. Empty shelves don't help — the material in the shelf is doing the work.
Recommended: IKEA Billy Bookcase [affiliate link] — deep enough to hold books properly, can be configured to cover a significant wall area.
What to Expect
These changes won't turn a bedroom into a recording booth. But a bedroom doesn't need to be a recording booth — it needs to feel quiet enough to sleep in.
The combination of heavy curtains, a large rug, and something substantial on the shared wall typically moves a room from the low-40s into the low-60s on the score. More practically: the room stops feeling acoustically restless. Sounds that used to intrude feel farther away.
The person who shared this room made the curtain change first. A week later: "I genuinely didn't realize how much the window was affecting my sleep until it stopped."
Try It in Your Room
Every bedroom has its own noise profile — the sources, the paths they travel, the surfaces they bounce off. Scan your room to see what's actually happening in yours.
Want to see your room score? Scan it free in the RoomTone app.