Most office spaces suffer from a common problem: they’ve actually been designed to be too quiet. If you’ve ever sat in a library, you’ve experienced this. Quite literally – you can hear a pin drop. While this may sound good in theory, the result is that workers in one area of the office can clearly overhear – and be distracted by – conversations in another area.
If this describes your office space, you’ve got three – and only three – tools to treat your office’s acoustics. Acoustical professionals use the convenient acronym, “The ABC’s of Speech Privacy” to describe them.
The ABCs of Speech Privacy
Absorption of sound waves by using a high-NRC-rated ceiling tiles
Blocking by using high-STC-rated panels, partitions, walls, windows, etc.
Covering by adding a source of unstructured [i.e., not music, which is information and therefore distracting], low-level background sound
Systems that produce this type of background sound (which typically sound like HVAC noise) have been in wide use since the 1970s and are generically described as “speech privacy systems,”"white-noise systems” or “pink-noise systems” (“white” and “pink” are often used but aren’t actually accurate terms), or “sound-masking systems.” “The ABC’s” is a convenient and memorable acronym of three components that must usually be combined in some form to achieve an acceptable level of speech privacy to improve workplace productivity. But in terms of the relative effectiveness of these three components (absorption, blocking, and covering), the acronym should be reversed. This is because the most gain can be achieved more quickly with the least expense and with the least disruptive by starting with “C”-i.e., employing a low-voltage electro-acoustic background sound system.
