noise transmission (and the reduction thereof) is affected by all aspects of building design. A wood building will not always be noisy. More expensive buildings tend to have multiple mitigations in place for sound transmission. These can be multiple special purpose layers in floors and walls, from elastic layers that are only a few mm thick, to inches of poured concrete present only for the sound response. A technique in very nice stick-built (the 5-over-1s mentioned) buildings is to have walls built with different structural systems for either side of the wall. Two layers of drywall on a single structural wall acts like a membrane, transmitting sound to the other side. Attaching drywall to disconnected structures greatly inhibits that vibration, at the cost of a thicker wall (lost rentable sqft) and ~2x spent on structure.
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