Author Archives: Matt Nees

speech privacy

Quiet Riot

Sometimes I am blown away with what I don’t know.  That’s not to imply I think I know everything.  Instead, I’ve been in the audio business a while and I’ve seen pretty much everything.  Recently I discovered a new dimension of the audio biz – a solid and growing commercial audio niche known as Sound Masking.  It’s been around for over 50 years, and recently I’ve joined one of the industry-leading companies, Cambridge Sound Management. Our product plays a special kind of noise in office environments ON PURPOSE – which for an audio guy like me first sounded, frankly, bizarre.

In my years at Boston Acoustics I encountered some weird ideas, sometimes in the form of business proposals from potential partners.  One wanted us to make audio systems for arcade video games. Sure, arcades are a business, but growing?  Another inquiry came from some third-world air force, wanting “2-inch subwoofers” for their helicopters.  OK, maybe that last one was my friends at Klipsch goofing on me.  And I remember the day one of the tool companies (Milwaukee?) called and asked about making a boom box for work sites. I wished I’d jumped on that one – job site boom boxes turned into a whole category.

 No helicopter subwoofer

Anyway, Sound Masking is no helicopter subwoofer. Sound Masking is the practice of deliberately inserting a carefully sculpted spectrum of noise to mask speech and increase privacy in a modern office building.  The result is quietness — counter-intuitively — because small sounds and particularly speech at a distance are obscured.  If you imagine classic public library (ssssshhhh!) anytime someone speaks, it’s a huge distraction.  By deliberately bringing the ambient noise level up, we mask conversations, reducing distraction.  Targeted at speech in particular (as opposed to random animal noise or amusement park noise), sound masking greatly quiet riotimproves the livability of the modern open office — whether cubicles or collaborative work areas. In addition, the system improves privacy for confidential conversations in offices. (Wouldn’t you like to NOT have to listen to that noisy person next door!)

There are a number of systems on the market, and all share the basic concept of playing a constant low-level “pleasant” noise. It’s not pink noise, and it’s certainly not white noise, which is very brash. It is a carefully tuned spectrum of sound, like gentle HVAC sound — soothing. The company I recently joined (see www.cambridgesound.com) has the simplest, most cost effective, easiest to set up system — the only one based on predictable direct-field speakers — tiny ceiling speakers placed every 10 feet or so in an office drop ceiling or open ceiling. Our customers range from small doctor’s offices to massive corporations with multi-building campuses.

Valuable to your business

I share all this not so much as an advertisement, but more to pass along a dimension of the audio industry you may not know about. If you are an installer or integrator, maybe this is a service you should add to your offerings for commercial clients. If you run a company or office and want to improve worker happiness and efficiency, you should consider this, probably above Foosball tables and free donuts. Email us if you want to learn more!

Stephen Shenefield is a veteran consumer electronics and audio product designer; he is Senior Director of Product Development at Cambridge Sound Management. You can read more of Stephen’s own blog postings about product design at www.vaetr.com.

Sound Masking for Office

Listening in on an Open Office Feedback Session

How quiet is your office? If you’re like most people, you’re probably not happy with the noise, distractions, and lack of privacy. There is a consistent and growing body of evidence that, more than any other aspect of their environment, office workers are unhappy with their workplaces’ acoustics. Imagine that—more people hate that they can overhear and be overheard by their coworkers than are unhappy with the thermostat setting.

The lack of acoustic privacy in modern offices is caused by a variety of issues including architectural designs intended to foster more collaborative and flexible workflows and office life. The architects, designers, and office furniture companies promoting these designs are often aware of the compromised acoustics of their designs, but they are not always equipped with the knowledge to prevent these problems.

I recently got to sit in on a meeting between a CSM partner and one of their clients eight months after a major remodel and restructuring of their office (sound masking was not part of the remodel). A sample of ten of the office workers attended the meeting to represent the entire office’s views, and they had no clue that there was a “noise guy” in the room. I did not even introduce myself, so they probably thought I was an intern.

The meeting started with each of the ten or so workers given sticky notes of different colors on which they could write both things they liked about the space and things they did not like. When the pink “dislike” stickies went up, there was a clear trend in many of them: acoustic privacy was the major concern. Over half of the pink stickies were about sound in some way.

Here’s some of what they had to say:

The sticky notes

The sticky notes

  •     “Very loud. Sound travels too much”
  •     “Noise and conversation carries between the conference rooms”
  •     “Some areas are noisy and loud, people can be distracting”
  •     “Can be noisy sometimes/hard to concentrate”
  •     “Noise level”

Some comments also delved into the etiquette of noise in the office such as:

  •     “Conference Rooms (people need to close doors)”
  •     “Phone etiquette (loud voices)”

The office was organized into different “neighborhoods” where many workers have the ability to migrate around the office and find a place to work which suits them. They have found that the different neighborhoods have taken on different “personalities” with noticeably different noise levels which strongly factor into individuals’ decision of where to sit.

The discussion briefly touched on etiquette relating to employees wearing headphones in the office. Those surveyed did not know the proper etiquette when a colleague they needed to speak to had headphones on, and noted they felt awkward and even guilty when trying to get their attention. While headphones might help employees block out unwanted noise distractions it can be uncomfortable for their coworkers when they do so.

I also learned that problems with thermal comfort caused employees to leave conference room doors open in order to get better airflow. Workers were essentially made to choose between acoustic privacy for their meeting or being too hot or cold in the meeting room.

Overall, the workers liked their contemporary office environment, they just wished it were “quieter.” Of course, what they really want is not quiet, but privacy and freedom from distractions.

– Rob Luckey, CSM Field Sales Engineer

 

New to Sound Masking? So am I.

In case you missed it, Mashable did a cool story last month on how noise distractions due to open office layouts (cube farms, dogbone tables, etc.) are the number one complaint amongst cubicle workers and that they also decrease worker productivity.

The article provides some common sense solutions on how to reduce noise distractions when you’re working (working offsite, turning a conference room into a quiet zone, using noise canceling headphones), but ignores one of the best solutions – sound masking.

What is sound masking? I just started working here at Cambridge Sound Management a couple of weeks ago, and must admit, prior to coming here I had never heard of sound masking. I didn’t really grasp how QtPro™ worked until I actually saw it in action at the office (as you might imagine, Cambridge Sound has its’ QtPro Sound Masking system installed here). In essence, small speakers (called emitters) emit ambient noise into the office space. The noise emitted kind of sounds like air conditioning, but you don’t really notice it unless you’re specifically listening for it.

In my last job, I had a private office and here I have a cube (my old company had a glut of office spaces and my new one a distinct shortage – alas). My current cube is WAY QUIETER than my old office. I heard every conversation, every cough, and every sneeze in the cubes outside. The office walls were thin (and let’s face it, they are probably thin in most office environments) and you could hear other co-worker’s conversations right through them.

One day someone who reported to me (let’s call her Cindy) used the office next to mine to do a job interview over the phone. I heard every word of it through the walls (I wasn’t eavesdropping, I promise). Learning that she was interviewing was useful information for me, because I learned we’d probably need to hire a new marketing assistant soon. Cindy, however, was pretty embarrassed when I told her I overheard her conversation (you might ask why I told her, and honestly, I can’t remember). Sound masking would have prevented this situation from ever occurring (don’t worry, Cindy got the job she was interviewing for and everyone lived happily ever after).

For those of you unfamiliar, this is what the cone of silence looked like

For those of you unfamiliar, this is what the cone of silence looked like

It’s not like I can’t hear anything in my new office and am in the old “cone of silence” from Get Smart. (If you think about it, being in a completely silent office would probably be worse than one that was too noisy – it would feel like you were in solitary confinement). Instead, I can hear the people in the cubes around me (which is good, because otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to ask them questions) but sounds and voices from other cubes are pretty faint. You can hear them, but they’re not really loud enough to be distracting. Plus, you can’t really make out what people who aren’t in your immediate vicinity are saying – the sound masking makes it hard to make out individual words.

And in case you’re wondering, you can’t hear anyone who’s in an office once they shut their door — I bet Cindy would appreciate that.

– Mark Hughes