Cheetos Sound Dampeners

Suppose your little brother comes into the room playing with a loud toy while you are eating Cheetos. How well could you dampen the sound with the Cheetos? 

For this experiment we used a decibel meter on a phone to determine the loudness of a toy. It was 74 decibels. 

Then we made a helmet with Cheeto Puffs.

We placed the helmet over the phone and measured the sound level.

We measured 69 decibels. The Cheetos absorbed 5 decibels of sound.

Observations: There were a lot of holes in the helmet we constructed. We think it would have blocked more sound if we were able to fit the cheetos together better.

As a comparison, an average set of passive noice cancelling headphones can reduce noice by 20 decibels. Our Cheeto headphones managed 5. So maybe Cheeto Headphones won't be the next product featured on Shark Tank - but we can dream.

Here is a video of our experiment.