Privacy and productivity are of utmost importance to any business. Nothing addresses them faster and better than a professional sound masking solution. Whether you’re a healthcare provider, a call center, a spa or any corporate office setting, creating the environment where your employees can stay focused and your customers feel safe and private makes a big difference. Sound masking is a simple solution that not only improves your employees’ focus, accuracy, and stress levels but typically pays for itself in less than two months.

Sound Masking to the Rescue

This is because the added sound reduces the intelligibility of human speech. When you can't understand what someone is saying, their words are less distracting — in fact, you probably don't even notice them. Here's an example of Sound Masking in everyday life. Have you ever had a conversation with someone while you are washing dishes and they are on the other side of the kitchen? When the water isn’t running, you can hear the other person’s words perfectly. When you turn the water on it becomes much harder to hear them and understand what they are saying. The person isn’t speaking more softly, but they sound as if they are. This is because the noise of the running water is “masking” the sound of the person speaking to you.

Sound Masking mimics this phenomenon on a much more sophisticated and effective scale. By adding ambient sound to an environment (such as professionally engineered sounds that sound similar to water flowing or airflow) you help mask the other noises in the environment, making them less distracting. Sound Masking doesn’t eliminate all noises in an environment; it simply reduces the area where human speech is intelligible and distracting. We call this area the radius of distraction.

Once masking is added, it becomes more challenging to understand conversations from across the room, and thus makes it less likely that conversations will distract you.