The new age office and workspaces have brought-in many challenges of defining the requirements of working ambiance; be it the seating, lighting, cafeteria, HVAC or one other feature or facility, all are on a continuous innovation, modernity and definitely towards improved practicality and operational efficiency.
Noise at work place is a 2 sided aspect; firstly, how silent do you make the environment by limiting or controlling all the possible sources, mostly from equipment that are integral to the setup; the other side is how the occupants of the place interact in terms of conversations, meetings and by other verbal communication means that build-up the ambient noise levels.
Some of the known and in-use methods are to treat the office spaces with acoustical materials with a good balance of noise absorption and isolation, as the case may be. While this allows the occupants to have good conversational quality (articulation index AI), due to the limited overall size of the office spaces and its occupation density, the human conversations tend to create significant cross talks and possibilities of overhearing across individuals or teams, thus making the speech privacy compromised.
The concept of 'sound masking' is being put into use to overcome both the physical isolation of the of spaces and to make the speech privacy more effective. Sound masking is an ambient sound, similar to the sound of airflow, that’s specifically engineered to the frequency of human speech.
Sound masking does not cancel sound or eliminate all speech noise in an environment; it simply attenuates how far away conversations can be heard and understood by others, which is called the radius of distraction. The typical scheme of introducing this deliberate sound into the workspace is a combination of strategically positioned speakers connected to a noise generating source, programmed, and tuned to the specific needs of the workspace.
NV Dynamics is working on these newer technologies to combine them with the traditional approach of architectural acoustics.