How Do Speech Privacy–Sound Masking Systems Work?
It is often assume that reducing “conversational distractions” requires developing and specifying, “quiet,” workspaces. It turns out that workspaces that are designed to be “quiet”, result in conditions where “conversational distractions” are increased not decreased. Most offices today have been designed to be too quiet. It’s like the old adage, “it’s so quiet you can hear a pin drop.” It isn’t the absolute “loudness” of the pin drop, but rather the absolute “quiet” of the environment. Much of what is heard in office settings that is considered a distraction is not “absolutely loud”, but “relatively loud.” In other words, the distraction is louder than everything else in the environment at that time. What Speech Privacy—Sound Masking systems do is to “fill in” the sound spectrum around you with barely perceptible low-level background noise, so that incoming speech is rendered unintelligible. The masking sound does not “cancel” but rather “covers over” intruding voices and noises.
