The most popular sound absorbing materials for home studio acoustic treatment are rigid fiberglass (e.g., Owens Corning 703) and open-cell polyurethane foam (e.g., Auralex Studiofoam). Foam is much easier to apply as it's easily reshaped with common cutting tools and it sticks to walls and ceilings with spray or tube adhesive. On the other hand, fiberglass has significantly better performance at frequencies below 500 Hz, the spectral region in which small untreated rooms can suffer most from detrimental modal activity and speaker boundary interference. Unfortunately, the needle-like fibers that make up fiberglass are a major irritant to skin, eyes, and respiratory systems; therefore, panels need to be wrapped with tightly-woven cloth or other suitable material. A third option, rigid mineral wool (e.g., ROXUL Rockboard), performs slightly better than fiberglass and is less of a surface irritant, but it still requires fabric covering and cutting it creates a fine dust. Its cost is also higher, and because it's the heaviest of the three, mounting requires more effort. For my Nashville home studio, I hired a cabinetmaker to assemble modular absorber panels out of furniture-grade plywood, mass-loaded vinyl, acoustic cloth, rigid fiberglass, and mineral wool. They look great and perform well, but they were expensive. On the ceiling of my live room I wanted a more organic look than the typical array of suspended studio clouds, so I tried a wholly different approach and I couldn't be happier with the results. Plus, I saved a ton of money. For the absorbent material, I chose 2-inch thick EcoSorpt Cotton Acoustic Panels from Acoustical Solutions <acousticalsolutions.com>. In my Boston studio, I had employed AlphaEnviro Hanging Baffles [Tape Op #38] of wrapped fiberglass from the same company to great effect, so I had high confidence in the EcoSorpt material since I trusted the published performance data on the company's website. According to their numbers, the compressed, recycled cotton material is on par with mineral wool (of the same thickness) for sound absorption across the whole spectrum. Crucially, the all-natural cotton is not an irritant, and you can slice through it with a long knife or a toothless rotary blade. I found a toothless blade on AliExpress that fit my table saw, but I ended up just using a 9-inch non-serrated carving knife from my kitchen. Attaching fourteen 4 ft × 8 ft EcoSorpt panels to the ceiling (with two of the panels needing some cutting) required four hours of my time (working solo), three tubes of Loctite Power Grab construction glue, and two cans of Loctite High Performance 200 spray adhesive. I could have left the panels bare – they're textured like a blanket that's just been washed – but to complete my vision for an organic look I hot-glued a total of 128 Sonic Acoustics hexagonal felt tiles (from Amazon) of various colors and depths directly onto the EcoSorpt. On their own, these 12 inch × 14 inch tiles exhibit very little sound absorption, given that the flat versions are only 8 mm thick, and the deeper 3D-shaped ones have less than 3 mm of actual material thickness. But the combination of these tiles layered onto 2 inch EcoSorpt provides exemplary reflection control, while offering a unique and fun presentation. Every visitor to my studio has commented on the room's visual appeal as well as its neutral sound. I think I spent more time planning out a pseudo-random pattern of tiles (with 11 variations of color and depth) on the studio floor than I did hot-gluing the tiles onto the EcoSorpt. Still, if I had chosen conventional fiberglass or mineral wool clouds, installation would have required additional hours, a second set of hands, and another ladder, as well as power tools, hard fasteners, and more money – with no better acoustic performance.