Exposed joists appearance

[bobtypey]

Hi I've browsed this forum for a while.
I'm now building a studio in a spare bedroom.
The room is currently 320cm x 300cm with H:250cm.

I'm eager to isolate the studio from impact noise of an apartment above.

I understand room in a room is the best way to do this but want to maximise room height where possible.

Is it possible to have exposed joist appearance from the bottom to make the room feel 'taller' and have mineral wool sandwiched in-between the original ceiling and the new ceiling? Would this pass building regs?

[Soundman2020]

Hi Bob, and welcome to the forum!

Yes, you absolutely can do that. Just leave the joists exposed on your inner-leaf ceiling. This is a technique often referred to as an "Inside-out" ceiling. It works like this: What is an "inside-out ceiling"? Do you need one? How do you build it?

You always need insulation in the gap between the ceilings, yes: it's part of the whole MSM system, which is how you get good isolation ( here's an explanation of how that works: What is MSM? How does it work? )

It's also good to have at least some insulation between those inner-leaf joists, as part of your acoustic treatment, but you could leve them partly exposed in some places, for the visual look you are wanting.

- Stuart -

[gullfo]

or fill the joist space with insulation (you'll still have the acoustic height), then add some strips to each joist for the "joist look". in a room i'm working on now, we're going inside with 9-1/2" i-joists for the ceiling frame and adding 2x4 on the edges later for the "open joist" effect. generally speaking once you have the lights on, other ceiling treatments (like diffusion and scattering devices), speakers (if doing atmos etc) then the "openess" of the joists will be mostly masked. you're generally better off with more absortion in the floor-ceiling space than not as that tends to be the higher mode frequency range in most cases.