Baby Room Acoustics: 5 Ways to Reduce Echo in a Minimalist Nursery

Update: This article was written during the planning phase of our nursery sound project. Spoiler: We tried the acoustic panels and they made a huge difference. Read the full story and see the rabbit-decorated results here: Montessori Nursery Acoustics.

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The Problem: A Beautiful Room With Echoing Sound

We live in an apartment, so moving our baby into her own room required some rearranging! There's no spare room around here.

We cleared out a family room—taking out a small couch, bookshelves, and tables—to make a beautiful, open space.

If you look around the rest of our home, you'll see we're certainly not minimalists. But, we wanted a more minimalist approach to her room.

After many hours, it was complete. Her crib, a cozy armchair, a low toy shelf, a thick rug, framed art, and some plants—that's it. It's perfect. We love it. She loves it.

But, wait. Our self-congratulatory cheers are... echoing? While not a full "mountain top" echo, the sound is tinny, and muddled. Our words blur. And, her toys are super loud. Yup, it's echoing.

Turns out, our beautiful, minimalist baby room isn't ideal for language learning!

Without the extra furniture, the sound waves are just ricocheting off the walls and windows. (In our other cluttered rooms, the sound quality is chef's kiss).

We're somewhat surprised given the prevalence of the Minimalist Baby Room aesthetic that we never encountered sound quality concerns from parents of typically-hearing children. Certainly, most babies are trying to learn language clearly. And, most babies are a bit loud. We would think most families would benefit from more sound absorption around the home!

But, for us, it feels more crucial that we get this sound situation optimized.

So, we begin our new baby room project—"Project Sound Absorption."

We still want her room to be baby-safe, and feel like her room. We don't want to sacrifice our general vision, and use of the room.

We also don't have a ton of noise-control experience, so we're mostly making this up as we go.

Here are some options we're considering to absorb sound, without sacrificing style! 

Rugs and Floor Cushions

One corner of the room is mostly wood floor. We've ordered a small, cute, washable, rug to cozy up that area. We also ordered a washable floor cushion.

This probably won't make a huge difference, but it's something we wanted to do anyway.

Acoustic Wall Panels

Acoustic panels aren't nearly as intimidating as we thought! 

Searching Etsy brought up many options for at-home DIY acoustic panels.

Most have a self-adhesive backing. Or, we can use 3M tape for something temporary.

We ordered a few extra-large and standard sized of these from NowSpinning, in varying shades of grey.

Update: This was our winning solution. Read more here about how we customized them for our Montessori room style.

Here are some other acoustic panel options we like.

• These jewel-like ones from RedesignYourWall
• How cute is this LEGO-inspired set for a kid's room? 

Felt Throughout the Room

Felt, felt, felt! Cover the world in felt! 

A hallmark quality of felt is that the edges don't fray. So, you can cut it and use it, without finishing the edges. It's also very forgiving to work with.

It's one of my favorite go-to fabrics.

Felt Toy Shelves

A wood toy banging on a wood shelf is not ideal. Bare wood shelves don't absorb much ambient sound.

So, we're planning to add some wool felt to her toy shelves.

We'll lose the "classic" Montessori wood toy shelf look, but gain so much!

We've ordered a swatch book from the Etsy seller oneoftheflock. Their two-tone felts look woodland-y, and would disguise wear and tear.

We also love that oneoftheflock offers yardage (fabric cut to your length from a long roll) instead of smaller sheets.

We still need to figure out how best to attach it to the felt to the shelf.

We'll update when it's done!

Wall-Mounted Felt Board

We're also planning to hang a thick felt board, with some large felt shapes, as a play zone. Two-for-one project!

We ordered an 18"x18" square of wool felt from the Etsy seller TheWoolFeltFerret.

At first, the plan was to mount the felt board on the wall.

But we soon found it made a great floor-based toy too. So we added it to our daugther's toy rotation and roll out the felt board and shapes for playtime.

Fabric in Embroidery Hoops

A friend of ours decorated her typically-hearing child's room using fabric and wood embroidery hoops.

It came out so cute! 

She mentioned another benefit, which is she can easily change the fabric down the road.

We love this concept! 

The thin fabrics that work in embroidery hoops probably won't absorb too much on their own.  

But, we could add some felt to the back! Or, maybe hide a small acoustic panel underneath.

This is definitely an option we're considering!

Hanging a Quilt

We're also considering hanging a quilt—especially if the acoustic panels don't work out.

One challenge is finding a lateral quilt, since a vertical one would be in the baby's pull-zone. Hang-worthy quilts are also pretty expensive, or super time consuming to make.

We'll revisit this one later, if we need to.

More Ideas

• Fabric banners and garlands
• Custom printed and ready made acoustic panel art on Etsy
• A bean bag chair

What We Actually Did

We found the sound panels made a huge difference—read more here!

We got years of use from our felt panels. They helped provide a better acoustic environment through babyhood and toddlerhood and into the preschool years.

The biggest challenge is that they occasionally fall off the walls. So we keep some extra 4x2 inch industrial velcro strips around to re-attach them.

Let us know what's worked for you!