BENEFITS OF SOUND MASKING

In today’s socially distanced office you could be forgiven for thinking that one silver lining would be a quieter workspace with fewer distractions. In some cases however a quieter office can in fact lead to a greater impact of distracting colleague interactions as the general ambient noise in the area no longer obscures the intelligibility of nearby conversations.

Imagine yourself (in a distant past life) settling down to some work in a busy coffee shop; laptop open, a steaming cup of triple venti half-sweet non-fat caramel Macchiato at your side. You’ll happily plug away in your own little bubble, oblivious to the hubbub around you. Now imagine that same scenario (insert absurd drink of choice) in an empty café, save one fellow caffeinator chatting away on their phone a few tables down. This will entirely distract you from your work simply because you can now listen to the words being spoken. Our brains, unfortunately, are nosy buggers, so if they can listen in to a conversation, they will. Bang goes the article you’re writing on Sound Masking.

Sound Masking (see what I did there?) is the practice of artificially introducing a carefully tuned selection of frequencies into a quiet environment to raise the ambient noise floor, which in turn adversely affects the intelligibility of nearby conversations. When correctly implemented the sound itself is imperceptible to the human ear but a colleague phone call that once would be a distraction is now ignored simply because the brain can not pick up the words that are being said.

POLAR can assist in the design and specification of simple or complex Sound Masking solutions that lower office distractions and raise levels of speech privacy, leading to improved wellbeing and productivity in the workspace.