Is it possible to noise-isolate my bed?
I live in a beautiful apartment in my favorite part of the city. But the neighbors on some nights are extremely noisy.
If I could noise-isolate my bed, that would be a huge quality of life improvement.
I was thinking about putting some noise absorbing material under the bed feet and a large noise blocking curtain over it. Like a baldachin or canopy bed.
Do you guys think that would work?
If noise is transmitted through the floor, add thick carpet and support your bed with a vibration deadening material, e.g. something viscoelastic. Sorbothane is popular for this but you'll need to spread the load out or pick a high durometer (stiff) rubber.
For the walls, hang up some carpets or similar, and/or hang heavy material around your bed as a canopy as you suggest. What you want is a material that's heavy enough that the energy in the sound waves is dissipated trying to move it around. Maybe a weighted blanket, or a duvet cover stuffed with mass loaded vinyl (used in cars for sound deadening).
Noise generators seem like the better way to start if you aren't using one already. I haven't tried many options but from the reviews I've seen fans are the best at this. In my experience ceiling fans do help quite a bit and there are some bedside noise generators that are fans but enclosed to limit the external air movement if the noise happens in colder weather. There are also some with speakers that play recorded fan noise, although beware of ones where the sample loops too quickly (I'm not sure what the best option to use your own recording would be). Unfortunately even getting to the point where you don't wake up (at least not enough to notice) may not fully remove the impact but it would still help quite a bit.
The best thing I have found is to play thunderstorm sounds with earphones. Thunderstorm sounds are inoffensive (unless you happen to be afraid of them) and intrusive noises are camouflaged within the variability of the storm noises. It is thus capable of deflecting your attention from louder sounds than white noise (which basically needs to be a lot louder than the intrusive sound)
Consider the sound Crimson Cloak for city masking. These are not cancelling, they are masking, but reasonably effective as well as portable.
As for the rest of your piece, if you don't want to spend too much, look to recording studio sound baffling and absorption for your room's sound reflective surfaces, or theater drapery for your windows and if you need more a canopy bed or hospital bed curtain tracks to enclose you in damping.
If you are willing to spend more, NYC and similarly dense cities (1 in 50 Americans live in NYC) have specialty home builders that can make music rooms, piano practice rooms, neighbor noise blocking rooms, etc., using box within a box construction techniques to separate your space from the spaces around you with sound dampening. (Think like vacuum bottle, but for acoustic waves instead of cold/heat.)
Here are many approaches between these paths:
Technically true, but more accurately, they are basically a physical EQ filter, that (at least in perfect world) ducks down every frequency a similar amount of dB, to not alter the music too much except the level, so the music on stage still sounds the same, but quieter. You can find frequency graphs in the manual (disclaimer: I have bought the Alpine ones and they are good).
https://acscustom.com/uk/products/other-products/sleep-sound
But yeah even they say that for maximum noise cancelling you want foam. These are better for comfort.