Why sound masking?
In many environments that require speech privacy, employee concentration, or both, there’s simply not enough background sound (also called ambient sound), leaving occupants trying to work in a pin-drop environment. In fact, the background sound level in most offices is so low you can easily hear conversations and noise from up to 50 feet (15 meters) away.
Benefits of sound masking
Noise control
Speech privacy
Improved productivity
Lower project costs
Facility flexibility
Quick ROI
What does sound masking sound like?
The sound masking “sound” has most often been compared to softly “whooshing” air, although it’s actually a specifically engineered blend of frequencies that’s perfect for covering up speech and incidental noises.
Sound masking makes a building seem quieter by raising the ambient noise level of an environment and making speech noise less intelligible and therefore less distracting. When you can’t understand what someone is saying, their words are less distracting — in fact, you probably don’t even notice them.
Sound masking is an ambient sound, similar to the sound of airflow, that’s specifically engineered to the frequency of human speech you can target conversational distractions and make them less distracting. Sound masking does not cancel sound or eliminate all speech noise in an environment; it simply reduces how far away conversations can be heard and understood by others, which we call the radius of distractions
How Does It Work?
In office spaces, the background noise level is generally low. Hence, people unintentionally overhear conversations – a difficult situation for all concerned. To address this problem, sound masking systems emit a soft, inconspicuous background sound with the use of a loudspeaker system. The ambient sound level becomes more uniform and otherwise noisy distractions are muffled by the sound masking.
Sound masking makes undesirable conversations and other noise distractions less audible. The result: Employees are less distracted, they are able to concentrate better, and their productivity rises measurably.
