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Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

Natural’ sounds improve mood and productivity, study finds

Author:    
Source:     Acoustical Society of America
Publication Date:     19-May-2015
 Link: Natural’ sounds improve mood and productivity, study finds
Stephan:   At one level this is a story about how an already artificial environment can be subtly tuned by mimicking nature. But it is also a confirmation that  spending time in nature as untouched by humans as you can handle is desirable. It recalibrates one. Our houses are cages of electrical wires, and we live in an electromagnetic field that pulses from them.  I have spent a lot of time backpacking and canoeing, and in my experience, and experiences of others that I have witnessed, some time on the the third day in nature one goes through a window, there is a very subtle shift.  Colors become brighter, everything is clearer. Your hearing improves, Once I understood it, I looked forward to it, and realized that until about 150 years ago there was no electrical field pervading the environment. It is a different state of consciousness to be outside the field.
Credit: nicholashan/depositphotos.com

Credit: nicholashan/depositphotos.com

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 19, 2015 — Playing natural sounds such as flowing water in offices could boosts worker moods and improve cognitive abilities in addition to providing speech privacy, according to a new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They will present the results of their experiment at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh.

An increasing number of modern open-plan offices employ sound masking systems that raise the background sound of a room so that speech is rendered unintelligible beyond a certain distance and distractions are less annoying.

“If you’re close to someone, you can understand them. But once you move farther away, their speech is obscured by the masking signal,” said Jonas Braasch, an acoustician and musicologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.

Sound masking systems are custom designed for each office space by consultants and are typically installed as speaker arrays discretely tucked away in the ceiling. For the past 40 years, the standard masking signal employed is random, steady-state […]

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