If you walk into most ‘office’ environments these days, you will notice some rather odd things. The room may be full of cubicles, each with someone working in it, on the phone, typing, and so on, but you don’t ‘hear’ much of it. If you watch a movie like Spiderman or Superman where the hero walks into the news room, you can get a feel for how much is going on by the amount of noise in the room. That’s not the case in many modern office structures these days.
I think it started with personal computers. The computers themselves do not dampen noise. If anything they very likely increase noise levels significantly. It may not be as noisy as a typewriter, but then with typewriters, the normal process was to put the majority of them in a room full of secretaries who would do the typing, called a pool. Computers on the other hand are on or under pretty much every desk in the office area. And increasingly there are two or three computers there.
Additionally computers do make noise even when they are doing nothing more than displaying a screen saver. So long as the computer is on, it is moving air through the computer with anywhere from one to 8 fans. Liquid cooled computers may be the ‘rage’ for gamers, but they are not all that common in offices.
What all these air movers do though is generate what is called ‘white noise.’ This is ‘wide spectrum’ noise, meaning that there are frequencies that can be heard from the low end of the hearing spectrum for humans, on up to the high end of the spectrum. Of course one of the realities is that this is not a evenly distributed pattern of noise. You may have some fans kicking out high frequenccy noises as bearings start failing, or others that spin at slower speeds, but with longer blades moving more air. However what all of these frequencies do is interact with other sounds in the environment.
When you mix two sources of a single frequency, you will have a pattern where at some points the levels are amplified, and at others they are diminished. If the two sources are at 90 degrees from each other, you get what looks sort of like an egg crate effect if you were to look at individual spots for amplified or diminished levels. You can also see this sort of an effect when looking at the ripples on a pond or pool of water if you drop a couple of stones in and look at the way the ripples interact. Of course that works better if you use a fairly fast camera exposure and look at a snapshot, but you get the idea.
In any case once people started using computers the actual noise level went up in offices, but the apparent noise level went down. The white noise didn’t affect the conversation between you and a co-worker a few feet apart. It did dampen the guy across the room hollering over the phone at a distributor for not having the product on it’s way already, and so on.
The problem though is that you can hear fans spinning, and the air they are moving. And that does affect some people in odd ways. Also it is an uneven distribution of noise. Which means that some sounds are going to carry through the effect better than others.
The long term result is the use of another variety of noise called Pink noise. Pink noise has a lot of the same characteristics as white noise. It does cover most of the noise spectrum for an area, but it does so much more evenly. It is usually generated by passing air through something that looks like a shower head, so at some level it involves moving air. The term ‘Pink noise’ is also used in the recording industry. I don’t know if the terms are completely interchangeable. I suspect that one group or the other created the term, identified what they ment by it, and the other group applied the definition to what they were doing. If I had to make a bet, it would be that recording studios had pink noise well defined, and when the people working on cutting down noise levels in office environments were loking for specialists to help them they encountered the term being used by recording engineers and clamped onto it. That’s a suspicion though, and is not grounded in any history.
Because it is as wid spectrum and evenly distributed, it is very rare to find someone who is negatively affected by the sound. It is also more effective at providing a ‘quiet’ environment for people to work in. Again though the environment really is not any more quiet. The think is that in order for us to actually perceive noise, as noise, we have to recognize it. The Noise a tree makes as it falls in the forest, the creek and pop of wood separating, the sound of branches passing other branches in the canopy, the crash of branches into other trees and the ground, the leaves being stripped off of branches and the thump of the trunk comming to rest on the ground, we almost all recognize because we have something to associate those sounds with.
There is a story from years ago of a man who declared that he could make a mountain disappear. A village took him up on the claim and for months nothing seemed to happen. Then one night he painted the mountain pink. The next day no one ‘saw’ the mountain, because in their mind there was no way to associate the color pink with the mountain. So it vanished and the man won the wager. I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone could paint a mountain pink overnight, but that’s not the point. The point is that if we don’t have something to wrap a sensation up in, a noise that dampens the noises of other things, we don’t perceive it.
If you take a audio db meeter into an office you will find that if there are pink noise generators in use, that the actual sound preasure levels are higher than if they are not in use. Again this does affect people, but not necessarily in the ways you might imagine. For many people the reported effect is that they just feel even more tired after a day at work than when the generators are not in use. Of course there are many possible reasons that people might report differing levels of exhaustion after a day at work. It could be the level of engagement they had at work that day, the stress of the work load, how recently they had their last cup of coffee, whether ‘certain’ people were in the office that day or not, and so on. I’ve also heard reports of people feeling ‘energized’ though again I don’t know how much of that might be due to other factors.
Of course any time some people hear the color pink used to with reference to anything, they will immediately associate it with other ‘pink’ things. Whether that means associating it with the Pink Carnation (which is actually where the color pink and it’s name comes from) or pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness, or even thoughts of sex, all of them have associations built that people work from, and as a result will think different ways about the though. I presume that for those who associate pink with sex, the ‘noise’ involved is either wet and sloppy, or alternatively very breathy and in some cases quite loud. Not exactly suitable for the office environment I would venture to guess. Though hopefully a sound the person associates with pink, being pleasing to them.
So any time you walk into a cubicle farm that is populated with people, and you realize that you can see someone across the way who is obviously hollering at someone on the phone, but you hear nothing more than a few words above the ambient noise that you don’t really notice, you can probably thank noise generators, perhaps even pink ones that we never notice.
