Can you soundproof your home against a noisy neighbour?

The Straits Times, Can you soundproof your home against a noisy neighbour?

By Research Assistant Professor Samuel Chng, LKYCIC, and

Assistant Professor Immanuel Koh, ASD & DAI

A cocktail of preventive design, clear norms and a touch of realism may be the true key to tackling noise disputes.

When neighbourly noise across the hallway becomes unbearable, the default advice seems commonsensical at first: close the doors and windows.

But in Singapore’s tropical climate, doing so can leave a home warmer and more dependent on air-conditioning. Keep these open for natural ventilation, however, and sporadic noise from traffic, construction and neighbourhood activity comes back in.

To make matters worse, some of the more distressing or persistent noise does not come through the windows at all. Footsteps, moving furniture and dropped objects from above or below can travel between floors through the building structure. Closing the door does nothing to shut out the noise.

This is the noisy-home paradox, where measures that improve one dimension of liveability can compromise another, and individual actions fail against persistent noise.

Noise is often a point of friction between neighbours.

Noise accounted for 85 per cent of the 299 Community Disputes Resolution Tribunals claims filed between April 2025 and July 2026. The nationwide expansion of the Community Relations Unit (CRU) from September is hence a timely move that recognises that such conflict requires cooperation and compromise to stem one category of noise at source.

Handling disputes after they boil over, however, is only half the fight. As Singapore becomes denser, the conversation should move beyond how severe disputes are resolved and towards asking how homes can be designed to prevent ordinary sounds from becoming intolerable intrusions.

Reassuring sound to one, pesky noise to another
The reality is that there are limitations to individual actions to mitigate neighbourly noise. For a start, neighbours living in the same area may not agree on what constitutes unwanted noise. What can appear as neutral ambient sounds of a vibrant estate may be a nuisance to another.

Children playing downstairs may disrupt someone working from home, yet reassure an elderly resident living alone of the company of a lively neighbourhood. At the same time, footsteps from the flat above may be ordinary evidence of family life, yet distressing to a shift worker trying to sleep.

Disagreement often arises because perceptions depend not only on volume, but also on lived experiences – on timing, duration, repetition and meaning, and whether the listener has any control over it.

Singapore’s consultations on neighbourhood noise reflect this complexity. The authorities themselves have acknowledged the difficulty of applying one decibel threshold across different neighbourhoods and circumstances.

In some scenarios, whether a noise is problematic may not be all that subjective – especially when persistent exposure disturbs sleep, elevates stress and affects well-being. Here, the shared objective should be to prevent residents from becoming captive audiences to sounds they cannot escape, rather than to eliminate all sounds altogether.

Technology in this area can be an enabler in establishing the source and severity of a disturbance when a dispute arises. Sensors that can detect vibration within structural components can help identify whether repeated impacts are travelling through a floor or wall without recording conversations.

Such methods nonetheless have their limitations. Sensors cannot establish intention or fully distinguish unreasonable disturbance from ordinary domestic life, and therefore cannot automatically decide who is at fault or resolve a quarrel in the face of a recalcitrant neighbour.

Which begs the question: Quite apart from downstream efforts at dispute resolution or personal actions to close doors, what can truly be done upstream to reduce such frictions in the first place?

The question of liveability
One approach is to zoom out and see the heart of the matter as a question of liveability.

A liveable city is not only one that moves efficiently and provides convenient services, but also one in which people can rest, work, care for their families and recover within the safety and comfort of their homes.

To these ends, the issue also becomes one of housing, design and industry standards.

Modern high-rise, high-density housing requires complex trade-offs between wind, light, heat and privacy. Voices, television and music can travel between homes through walls, gates, windows and other openings. Aircraft, traffic and other external environmental sounds are fixed urban realities.

Long before people move in, soundproofing floors, walls and windows would go a long way to mitigate noise complaints.

Urban planning on this count has not stood still. Before construction tenders are launched, HDB master planners and architects tackle environmental noise during early block layout design, analysing wind flow, daylight and noise modelling to decide on building orientation, facade design, and the positioning of windows and doors.

HDB layouts today also commonly use corridors, utility rooms and bathrooms as buffers between living areas and external activities, and thicker floor slabs to mitigate noise between floors.

Recent interventions have become more creative and include affordable air-conditioning. In Tengah, households can subscribe to centralised cooling, which may make it more comfortable to close their windows during noisy periods.

Since 2007, the Building and Construction Authority’s Green Mark framework also recognises the importance of sound insulation in the design of residential buildings under the category of indoor environment quality.

Such explicit acoustic performance targets for new housing, covering both airborne and structural impact noise, can be expanded to include tests on completed flats for compliance before handover rather than rely on pre-construction design specifications.

These improvements are not cost-free.

Higher-specification materials could raise construction costs, while additional testing and more complex systems may lengthen delivery or add maintenance needs. The cost would have to be borne by home buyers, the state or both, and weighed against housing affordability as well as the improvement in acoustic comfort.

Rather than apply every possible measure across all developments, a more proportionate approach would target those with the clearest benefits, particularly where exposure or transmission risks are higher.

What about existing flats? Self-help could be supported, with an authoritative diagnostic and renovation guide that identifies suitable treatments, required approvals and the improvements residents in older flats can realistically expect from renovations to mitigate noise and create quiet rooms.

In all these endeavours, a touch of realism might be needed. If anything, the CRU pilot and its national expansion is a reflection of how design and technology cannot resolve every dispute. Of the nine noise cases handled, four involved people with mental health issues, one involved deliberate disturbance, and four appeared to suggest heightened sensitivity where no objective noise exists.

A cocktail of solutions is needed – from preventive design to clearer community norms and greater engagement. A safety net supported by human intervention where the CRU remains the specialist response for severe cases provides recourse in the most egregious cases when design reaches its limits.

Dense living should not require silent living. After all, the sounds of other people are part of communal life. But no one wants to be trapped at home with a noisy neighbourly nuisance. If that happens, perhaps the best thing to do is to go talk to your neighbours, nicely.

• Samuel Chng is a research assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he heads the Urban Psychology Lab. Immanuel Koh is assistant professor in both Architecture and Sustainable Design Pillar and Design and Artificial Intelligence Programme at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.