Does anyone know why North America uses standard drywall for interior walls? It's the same in hotels, and whenever I visit it freaks me out a bit. I don't want to hear what's going on in the room next door. In Europe, interior walls between units are typically made from concrete or masonry which is much better at sound proofing.
Much of North America has strong earthquakes, which limits the kinds of materials you can safely use. Masonry in the US must be engineered and reinforced to survive earthquakes, which adds significant cost. Masonry construction was common in the US centuries ago, but we have a lot of experience with earthquakes doing severe damage to unreinforced masonry, so that kind of construction is prohibited in most places.
You can have very quiet buildings without masonry. I've lived in a few, all steel framing and drywall with proper sound isolation. It is all in the construction technique. Even purpose-built sound isolation rooms are little more than wood and drywall, properly engineered, anywhere on the planet.
I have never heard of a steel framed / drywall house before. I looked it up and appear they are offered in my country. How does steel make it quieter? I would think steel would transmit more noise than wood.
Soundproofing is about insulation materials, quality doors and building above the minimum. A lot of midrise condos are built to a pretty shitty standard to make the numbers work. Sometimes they do stuff like glue wall panels instead of fastening, so you get things starting to loosen quickly as the building shifts.
If you stay in a decent midrange hotel (Hampton Inn, Marriott, etc) the sound is pretty good. They are prefabricated concrete, but look at the details, surfaces are carpeted, textured ceilings, there are rubber gaskets everywhere, etc. You usually don’t hear the nighttime adventures of your neighbors, but you can smell a bag of popcorn from 50 yards away because ventilation sucks.
Steel framing tends to be correlated with higher wall mass, which means better sound isolation.
The original discussion was about noise in multi-family homes e.g. apartment buildings and high-rises, which tend to be steel beyond a certain height. While there are single-family homes built with steel framing in the US, they are less common; they have some advantages but cost more to build and are more difficult to thermally insulate than wood.
Every multi-family high-rise I've lived in used steel construction and drywall and had excellent sound isolation -- I never hear my neighbors and vice versa.
Steel vs wood doesn't really matter. The key to soundproofing is having sound absorbing mass in between walls. As long as you fill the gaps between drywall with a decent amount of insulation it should be reasonably sound proof.
In fact many professional "sound absorbing panels" you might see in a recording studio or on the walls of movie theaters are made from insulation.
I grew up in Taiwan on the pacific rim of fire (think earthquakes) as result buildings are ugly and concrete most of the time. And it is noise. I could hear everything and everyone and you get the strange marble dropping sound to boot too. At the end proper sound proofing worked, used multiple layers of wood and dry wall worked wonders.
