Tuning the cognitive environment: sound masking with 'natural' sounds in open-plan offices

Abstract

With the gain in popularity of open-plan office design and the engineering efforts to achieve acoustical comfort for building occupants, a majority of workers still report dissatisfaction in their workplace environment. Office acoustics influence organizational effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction through meeting appropriate requirements for speech privacy and ambient sound levels. Implementing a sound masking system is one tried-and-true method of achieving privacy goals. Although each sound masking system is tuned for its specific environment, the signal – random steady state electronic noise, has remained the same for decades. This research work explores how `natural' sounds may be used as an alternative to this standard masking signal employed so ubiquitously in sound masking systems in the contemporary office environment. As an unobtrusive background sound, possessing the appropriate spectral characteristics, this proposed use of `natural' sounds for masking challenges the convention that masking sounds should be as meaningless as possible. Through the pilot study presented in this work, we hypothesize that `natural' sounds as sound maskers will be as effective at masking distracting background noise as the conventional masking sound, will enhance cognitive functioning, and increase participant (worker) satisfaction.