I've struggled with apartment noise for years, so I attempted to engineer a mechanical solution: a decoupled, mass-loaded sleep capsule.

I went down a deep rabbit hole involving:

- Mass Law vs. decoupling

- Building a prototype cube

- Accidentally creating a resonance chamber (my prototype amplified bass by ~10dB)

- Pivoting to acoustic metamaterials (Helmholtz resonators) and parametric CAD

The project was ultimately a failure in terms of silence, but a success in understanding acoustics and regaining a sense of agency. I wrote up the physics, the build process, and the mistakes here.

Happy to answer questions about the build.