Author Archives: Matt Nees

Cambridge Sound Management Featured in Fast Company

 

On Monday, Fast Company posted an article on office noise distractions featuring an interview with one of our very own Justin Stout.

 

A sample:

 

We all know checking our email and social media feeds take a bite out of our daily productivity, but there’s another culprit that may be your be draining your mental resources: noise.

Recent survey data from Cambridge Sound Management revealed the impact of noise on productivity, which will likely come as no surprise to those of us working in open offices. The survey revealed nearly 30% of office workers are distracted by coworkers’ conversations. These distractions appear to impact men more than women, with one in three men saying they were distracted by noise at work, compared to one in four women.

Justin Stout, Cambridge Sound Management’s acoustical expert, says noise in general isn’t to blame when it comes to lost productivity. “When we talk about distractions what we’re primarily concerned with is intelligibility,” says Stout.

 

You can read the whole article here.

Collaboration vs. Speech Privacy: Can Modern Offices Have it Both Ways?

There’s plenty of information online about how open offices are bad. One journalist even went as far as to call them “Satan’s Handiwork.” While the common complaints about open office environments including noise distractions, interruptions, and lack of privacy are well founded, (and well documented in this excellent New Yorker piece) they must have some benefit. After all, there has to be some reason why companies keep building them, right?

For example, look at the offices in the on officesnapshots.com – none of these really look like the devil’s handiwork to me. Facility managers, designers, and architects (when companies have the time and resources to employ them) are rarely trying to make offices boring and drab replications of the office from the Matrix – they are trying to make them elegant and functional. The recent trend is away from cubicles and towards common workspaces and areas. Those cubicle walls are coming down, partly because they are ugly, but also because companies are striving to create an environment that facilitates collaboration and transparency.

So the good thing is that new office spaces are cool looking and seem like fantastic places to hang out. Who wouldn’t want to chill in an office with a slide between floors and a Lego room? The bad news is that the ugly cubicle walls that are disappearing were also blocking sound. With so much open space in modern offices, conversations in open areas can be heard by people as far as 100 feet away. Many offices create private office spaces where people can take a phone call in private, but how do you mitigate excess noise distractions in the open areas where people are supposed to be collaborating – and presumably speaking to one another?

The most effective solution is to install a sound masking solution in the office space. Sound masking is the addition of an unobtrusive background noise into an environment that covers up excess noise in the environment. Small speakers that emit this noise are placed in the ceiling or mounted to posts, and it makes it so conversations that are 40-100 feet away are no longer overheard. With sound masking, companies can adhere to their open-office vision while ensuring the finished product is still an acoustically comfortable place to work.

This beautiful new office in downtown Boston used sound masking to create, in their words, “an open office experiment that actually worked,” and so did this Texas company who took the idea of an open-door policy very literally. As more offices move to more collaborative and aesthetically pleasing open-office plans, sound masking should continue to be a part of the trend.

 – Mark Hughes

QtPro Product Family and emitters

What’s QtPro and How Do I Buy It?

When I am explaining my job, and thus sound masking, to friends and relatives, the general response is “I’d love that product for my office – there are so many noise distractions there!” They usually want to know what QtPro looks like and how they can buy it. Sounds like a blog post to me…

The Product:

Sound masking is the process of adding a low level, unobtrusive background sound to an environment (it kind of sounds like HVAC noise) to reduce noise distractions. The masking noise covers up, or “masks” excess speech noise and makes it less distracting.

The QtPro modules and emitters.

The QtPro modules and emitters.

Cambridge Sound Management’s sound masking product is the patented QtPro system. QtPro consists of three simple components

  1. emitters (i.e. speakers) that are installed in the ceiling
  2. A control module
  3. Cables that connect the emitters to control modules

The Qt Control Modules come in three different sizes depending on the size of the space they cover. So if you just had small space that only required a consistent masking volume across the entire space, a Qt100 would probably suffice. If you’re trying to cover a large space with multiple floors, and some areas required different masking levels than others, it would probably behoove you to have multiple Qt600s installed.

 OK cool, how do I buy QtPro?

The person making the decision to purchase sound masking might be different depending on how large your company is. If you’re in a large company it might be a VP of Facilities. At a small company the owner or president might make the decision. Most of the time, bringing up sound masking to your office manager or HR manager is a good place to start – they’ll either take it from there or let you know who at your company to talk to.

Once the right decision maker is informed, they should go to cambridgesound.com where they can request a quote or schedule a demo. We’ll then connect them with a certified masking professional that can provide an estimate of how much adding sound masking to the office would cost.

Certified masking professionals include service providers your company probably uses for other services – your company’s phone or telecom or audio/visual vendor for example. Once your company is ready to move forward, the masking professional buys the product from us and then installs it in your office.

That’s it! Now you know what QtPro is and how to get it.

Now go talk to your office manager!

 – Mark Hughes

 

Crunch Masking: So You Don’t Hear As Many People Chewing

So I was browsing Reddit the other day and saw this meme and the substantial number of comments it spawned. The general consensus of the commenters is yes Fry, the whole room can hear you munching on snacks – it’s not just in your head.

helps business owners improve acoustic environment, sound masking in workplaces

As an avid office eater myself, the comments about how often office-food-eating is overheard made me a bit self-conscious, but since we have Sound Masking installed in our office I take solace in the fact that while the people in the cube next to mine can probably hear me crunching on granola bars, at least the person in the cube 15 feet away can’t. Many of the comments suggest that most people in open office spaces are not so lucky.

The commenters diverge off-topic occasionally to topics ranging from intellectual property to Funyons (this is Reddit after all) but when they do go back to discussing the meme, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Sound Masking systems were alluded to numerous times as a way to cut down on the noise, although most commenters didn’t know what the technology was called.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

  • “White noise machines are pretty standard in most office buildings. You might not know you have them. You definitely notice when they’re gone, though.”
  • “I work in a 50 floor building and they pump in white noise as well. At 6 PM they turn it off… Along with the ac.”
  • “we have pretty loud white noise pumped in through the speakers. When they make an announcement, the white noise goes away for a few seconds, and you realize just how quiet the office is without it.”

(Technically, Sound Masking is not exactly white noise but I will cut the commenters a break.)

The issue the last comment is referring to regarding his paging system shutting the Sound Masking off is similar to a phenomenon we experience here at the office when someone turns off the Sound Masking to do a demo for clients. It goes from sounding comfortably busy-sounding to eerily quiet instantly. This is because Sound Masking works by adding sound into the environment. The sound added is often mistaken for white noise (or HVAC noise) but it’s actually a pleasant, specifically tuned frequency that’s designed to cover up excess noise distractions. As the commenter notes, you don’t really notice Sound Masking until it’s gone, and when it’s gone, noises that typically aren’t distracting in a Sound Masked environment (like chewing) become incredibly noticeable.

We all like the idea of a quiet office, but is that what we really want? Commenter Em_etib writes about his “too quiet” office –

“…we can literally hush-whisper across the room and still hear each other. Like, not the stage, lowered voice whisper, but actually hushing your tones and speaking as quietly as possible. Someone crinkling a bag will create a HUGE noise and distraction. It’s ridiculously, unnaturally quiet.”

Em_etib goes on to discuss how self-conscious he is while eating fruit because he thinks everyone will be able to hear it. He brings up a good point. Offices that are “too quiet” are the ones where you’re most likely to be able to hear people chewing, crunching, and opening potato chip bags. Think of a quiet library. Every smack of gum, every thump of a pencil, every whisper or cough sounds much louder because there’s no background noise to drown those noises out.

As a marketer, communicating this “too quiet” message can be difficult, but I’m happy that Redditors are doing their part to help spread the word. Perhaps someday every office will utilize our “crunch masking” technology…

– Mark Hughes