Modern wood houses have very poor noise insulation. I grew up in a brick house. When I came to Canada, and I found I had to keep my voice down at night, while speaking in a closed room was news to me. Not only can other people in the house hear, but so can the neighbors! I don't know how people live like this.
> Modern wood houses have very poor noise insulation
I agree, but this doesn't have anything to do with the woodenness of the construction. Virtually all interior walls in your typical North American single-family home, built with wood or not, are lacking insulation. Code doesn't require it, people don't want to pay extra for it, and builders don't want to convince people to spend the money for it.
Noise isolation is mainly about adding mass. Thermal insulation is mainly about creating a continuous skin and filling the void with something as close to a vacuum as you can get.
Home insulation doesn’t work by making walls close to vacuum. You insulate walls by stuffing more (but not too much) of stuff into them, not by pumping out air or anything silly like that.
Vacuum is a great insulator, because it blocks two fastest ways of heat transfer, conduction and convection, leaving only radiation. House insulation tries to do the same thing: filling up the wall with fluff blocks air from moving around, which impedes convection. Fluff itself is made from materials of low thermal conductivity, like cotton or mineral wool. At the end of the day, though, filling walls with fluff makes them less like vacuum, not more.
