Sound Masking vs. White Noise: The Important Difference Needed to Increase Workplace Efficiency

Sound masking is becoming a huge trend in the workplace, but curiously because of an “issue” with modern office design. The classic office layout and aesthetic is the “cubicle farm,” where a large room is divided by numerous cubicles. The ever-popular film Office Space not only captures this visual well, but also the negativity associated with office work that is forever linked to cubicles. To restore the image of the office, especially in the unprecedented rise of work-from-home that corporations would like to see recede, a new design was needed: the open office floor plan.

In this arrangement, large, open office spaces with tall ceilings were prioritized and cubicles removed in favor of desks, in the hope that the open environment would lead to a more communal feeling that would then translate to improved efficiency. Instead of not wanting to go to the “cube farm,” employees would be excited to go to a new, sleek, and open office environment where they could feel more connected to one another and thus perform better.

This was exactly the idea a recent customer of mine had when setting up their new office space. Unfortunately, he discovered something unsettling once the office was complete and employees came in for work: a cacophony of noise. Where the new office was supposed to improve the efficiency of his workforce, it was causing a detriment. Solving a problem caused a new problem! But not to worry, this is where sound masking comes into play, and is a game-changer.

In this article, I will explore the acoustic issues with open office floor plans, and detail how sound masking – not white noise – provides an elegant answer that creates perhaps the best office environment yet conceived.

Using Noise to Create a More Peaceful and/or Efficient Environment

What wasn’t realized when companies started getting rid of cubicles in favor of open-offices with large desks was that cubicles provided a much more important function than just cordoning off employees. If you’ve ever sat in a cubicle, you know that the partitions are made of soft fabric. Why? To control and tone all of the sounds of the office! Cubicles are a fantastic way to eliminate reverb and echo that can readily add up to a horribly loud room. Essentially, cubicles are partitions made of acoustic panels! Not only that, but the classic office also tended to feature drop ceilings with ceiling tiles. And wouldn’t you know? Ceiling tiles, like cubicles, are designed to provide sound absorption. Remove this massive square footage of soft, sound absorbing material for hard desks and open ceilings and you have a real noise issue. Companies have essentially turned well sound controlled spaces into caverns and caves!

Curiously, the solution to this issue is in fact more noise. It seems counterintuitive, but the addition of good noise can actually cancel out bad noise, allowing cavernous open office settings to be tuned appropriately so that office sounds do not pose a threat to employee efficiency. That said, it’s extremely important to utilize the right noise, which brings us to the difference between white noise and sound masking.

What is White Noise?

You’ve likely heard of white noise if not actively used it. White noise is a noise used typically as a sleep aid. Technically speaking, white noise is a type of consistent, unvarying sound that contains all frequencies audible to the human ear, distributed evenly across the sound spectrum. It can and has been used effectively as a therapeutic, most commonly as a sleep aid, especially with young children. That said, it is not a natural sound, and there are better options, like pink noise which mimics the sounds of nature that we love to hear while outside.

If you’d like to learn more about white noise, and why pink noise is better for therapeutic purposes, I recommend this article that looks at all noise types and why some are better than others.

For these reasons, white noise is not an effective way to solve the issue of noisy offices, because the specific frequencies used add to the acoustic mess. This is where sound masking comes in.

Sound Masking

The difference between sound masking and white noise is sound masking uses specific frequencies played to mimic human speech. Not only that, sound masking systems play these frequencies in a dynamic fashion, instead of just a constant, never-ending sound like white noise.

To understand how this can “eliminate” office noise, let’s think about it with a visual analogy. Let’s say that in your open office, all of the employees are wearing different brightly colored clothes. The walls and ceilings of the office are all white, so the multi-colored workforce stands out and is extremely distracting visually. If, however, the walls and ceilings were themselves multi-colored, suddenly the employees and their outfits are no longer distracting because they blend in.

This is exactly how sound masking works acoustically. By utilizing specific, tailored frequencies that are played dynamically, sound masking noise blends into office noise and creates a peaceful noise that isn’t distracting. It is rather ingenious, and certainly remarkable that this one addition to the office can provide such a fix to the issue of distracting noise.

Featured Sound Masking Systems

I have been honored to help numerous customers remove their panic from distracting noise after building a brand new, open office workplace. As acoustic experts, we saw from far off how this change in workplace design would lead to issues, and jumped ahead of the trend to find the best solutions possible for when customers would inevitably call.

For the best, most powerful sound masking solution, I recommend the Lencore Sound Masking System.

The system is customizable no matter your office layout and can be utilized from small rooms and private offices to large office spaces up to 1.5 million square feet! Lencore’s proprietary Green Sound™ is engineered by audio experts to provide the most comfortable (and thus effective) sound masking system on the market.

For smaller use-cases, I love this Desktop Sound Masking System.

In many instances, an office-wide sound masking system isn’t necessary, which makes this desktop system a great option to provide the power of sound masking on a case-by-case basis. This also doubles as a bluetooth speaker for more functionality when sound masking isn’t needed.

The Importance of Sound Absorption Alongside Sound Masking

To greatly help the effectiveness of sound masking, I advise making sure that the space is treated acoustically via the techniques of sound control and soundproofing. The difference between these two is very important; in short, soundproofing stops sounds from leaving a space and coming in, while sound control aims to tone and control sounds so that they are heard cleanly.

While your space may be in need of soundproofing, it definitely will benefit from sound control. By utilizing acoustic panels, office noise can have a significant amount of its detrimental sounds eliminated so that the sound masking process can be finely tuned.

Acoustical panels like Alphasorb work to eliminate echo and reverb, two issues that are magnified by large, open office spaces.

Large open ceilings, for example, are literally cavernous, and the first thing we all think of when thinking about echo is caves and caverns! By utilizing acoustic panels and other sound control techniques, you can craft the proper base to craft the best acoustics possible to finally deal with noise via sound masking.

Achieve Efficiency in the Workplace with Sound Masking Solutions from Acoustical Solutions

When looking to boost workplace efficiency by eliminating office noise, sound masking is the true solution. At Acoustical Solutions, our mission is to help you craft the best acoustics in your space and provide industry-leading sound masking systems to create cutting-edge workplace environments.

To learn more about sound masking systems and advanced sound control products, please reach out to me today!

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To learn more about how Acoustical Solutions can solve your noise control problems, use our contact form, call one of our Acoustical Sales Consultants at (800) 782-5742, or visit us on the web at acousticalsolutions.com.