Aural Comfort and Acoustical Privacy in the Workplace

Popular version of paper 1pAAa1
Presented Monday afternoon, October 17, 2005
ASA/NOISE-CON 2005 Meeting, Minneapolis, MN

After many years of relative dormancy, sound-masking technology, in which one sound source (such as white noise) obscures another (such as a coworker engaged in a phone conversation) is taking acoustical comfort and privacy to new levels as a result of a renewed interest in office productivity.

Aided by a new emphasis on acoustic privacy in the healthcare (e.g., the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), and legal professions (lawyers offices and courtrooms), once again acoustics is in the public eye and at the vanguard of the workplace.

What started out as a concept immersed in increased efficiency of workflow in the office more than 40 years ago has now developed, with the aid of interior space planners and acoustical consultants, into a keen emphasis on acoustical privacy. No longer does the science of acoustics have to play catch up to management and design schemes that had been unaccustomed to dealing with the unobstructed transmission of noise throughout the open-plan office that resulted from eliminating full-height walls and doors that office workers had come to expect.

The 60s and 70s saw the emergence of a new concept from Germany known as Office Bundshaft or Office Landscape. The acoustical consulting community struggled to develop criteria for assessing ways of dealing with office workers noise in the open concept without enclosing walls and doors. A lot was learned from direct experience, throughout the 80s. During the 90s, the dot.com era brought a number of interesting developments to the open-plan office. Flexible open space, and hoteling (in which workers share and regularly rearrange a limited amount of office space) not only saved money by eliminating the construction of fixed, full-height gypsum board walls, but mobile furniture components allowed space to be quickly reconfigured from individual office workstations to conference-space or team-working space units. Once again, acoustical consultants dealt with the challenge of moving/rotating sound sources and conflicting space utilizations. The level of background noise from the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system was found to be a critical component of achieving speech privacy. Energy conscious mechanical system designs no longer provided the audible hiss/whoosh sounds from air passing through diffusers that masked unwanted distant noise. Hence there was a need for this sound to be generated electronically via sound masking systems.

Most recently, corporate working environments have settled down and returned to more stability in terms of real estate/floor utilization. Sound masking has become an accepted and common component of good space planning and acoustical design. Greater acoustical privacy and freedom from distractions, with current state-of-the-art sound masking technology, leads to increased worker efficiency and productivity, which translates into corporate profit. Acoustical consulting is leading the way in providing technical design assistance to architects, space planners, and facility managers to achieving more comfortable work environments for corporate America.