Quiet Showers

Is there some way to make showers less noisy? I don't want to take baths, but I do want to be able to listen to something -- be it music, the radio, or a podcast -- while I am cleansing myself without the overwhelming sound of water blasting blocking it out.

I don't think most people realize how loud showers are because they quickly becomes ambient noise, but the fact is you have to blare whatever your trying to listen to if you want to make out any words while you are taking a shower. That is annoying to the person in the shower who feels like they are being subjected to a yelling match and to the people outside of it forced to listen to garbled news reports through the bathroom door.

This guy knows what I am talking about: coolguy2.

It seems to me there are two major factors that need to be addressed. The first is the noise the water makes coming out of the showerhead. One solution is to reduce the speed of the water, but a low-flow showerhead is not a sacrifice people are going to make and I doubt they do that much to reduce decibels.

Instead, I think you start to solve the problem by increasing the size of the apertures. I suspect the noise is created when the water tries to squeeze through a small hole, but if we reduce the friction between the water and the aperture by creating one big hole to reduce surface area, that could work. The risk would be that you would lose velocity by creating a big hole and effectively create a low-flow showerhead through other means, but there must be a work-around for that. Maybe the plumbing can be tweaked to boost velocity to compensate without significantly increasing noise volume?

Next you want to do something to keep the holes the water comes out of clean to minimize unnecessary noise caused by debris buildup shrinking apertures and giving the water a bumpy ride. A material that does not corrode easily and does not latch on to gunk or have a high coefficient of friction would be good here. In fact, I would recommend going to with a material with a low friction anyway, because that would reduce noise. Basically, noise is caused by energy and we want our water to have a lot of energy, but we want to minimize how much of that energy gets turned into noise along the way.

Once it is in the air, the water is momentarily not a problem, but then it lands, so the second factor is the noise created by the water hitting the porcelain of your bathtub. This seems like an easier problem to fix because there must be a less percussive material that can be installed instead of the standard porcelain. We want something that is less like a rumble strip and more like a shag rug, but not so shaggy. Is it possible for something to absorb sound without also absorbing water or are the adjectives waterproof and quiet mutually exclusive?

There is a third factor, of course: water hitting the bather's body, but that is unavoidable. I'd like to believe that this is actually a negligible factor and that if you can reduce the noise from the first two factors to the level of water hitting the body then the issue will be adequately resolved.

So, are there any acoustics & materials engineers out there who can help me solve this problem? Maybe you can even come up with a way to convert the sound back into energy to help power the radio or something, I don't know, work with me here. (This is a million-dollar idea, by the way, so if anyone of you successfully implements it on a mass scale then I want my percentage.)