About as quiet as a pet bird gets
If flat living rules out most birds for you, doves are the exception worth a closer look. A dove's voice is a low, throaty coo produced without the power or carrying pitch of a parrot's call, a budgie's chatter or a canary's song. In practical terms, dove sound fills the room the cage is in and fades quickly beyond it; through a normal party wall, neighbours typically hear nothing at all. That is why doves have been kept in apartments, studios and shared houses for generations by people who could never keep a louder species.
The sounds a dove does make
Quiet does not mean silent, and a flat keeper should know the full repertoire. A male ringneck dove coos in bouts — a rhythmic bow-coo when courting, including courting you, a perch-coo when content, and a persistent advertising coo when he wants a mate's attention. Those bouts can run for some minutes at a stretch and often start early, because doves wake with the light. Females are markedly quieter, one reason flat keepers often choose a hen or a bonded female pair. Add the soft laugh-like call when excited, the whirr of wings when the bird startles off a perch, and gentle seed-scratching sounds, and you have the whole list — everything on it is conversational volume or below.
Honesty about timing matters more than volume. A cooing bout at dawn in a studio flat where you sleep three metres from the cage will wake a light sleeper even though it would never wake the neighbours. A cage cover that keeps the bird's corner dim until a civilised hour, and placing the cage in the room furthest from your bed, solve most of it.
Placement and setup for thin walls
Put the cage against an internal wall that is not the neighbour's bedroom wall where you can, and keep it off shared-wall corners that can carry vibration from wing whirs and cage-door clicks. A solid cage stand rather than a hanging cage reduces transmitted sound, and a washable mat under the cage deadens dropped-seed patter on hard floors. Keep the bird's light cycle regular — doves coo most at first light and around dusk, so curtains or a cover that steady those edges also steady the noise pattern your household lives with. If your flat has a no-pets or birds clause, check it before the cage arrives; dove quietness helps your case with a landlord, but the permission question comes first.
When a dove might still be too much
Two situations deserve a pause. A single male ringneck with no mate can coo persistently through the day calling for company — the fix is company, in the form of a companion dove or generous human presence, not punishment or covering the cage in daylight, which only confuses the bird's cycle. And a very light-sleeping owner in a one-room studio may find dawn cooing a daily cost no placement trick fully removes; for that keeper, a female dove or a pair of quiet diamond doves, which murmur rather than coo, is the realistic route. Everyone else in a flat — working from home, sharing with housemates, mindful of the neighbours — will find a dove's soundscape easy to live inside. Agreeing feeding times, cover times and who lets the bird out keeps housemates from accidentally resetting the routine, and KinsLe Family Sharing keeps that dove schedule and its quiet-hours notes on a shared profile everyone in the flat can see.