Open Office Mask
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Open Office Mask
"Open-Space Mask" is a practical focus mix for working in a noisy open-plan office: a base of dense white noise at moderate volume, with an air conditioner and city noise outside the window on top. The aim is to create an acoustic "shell" that covers coworkers' conversations without itself becoming distracting.
This is a very practical problem of the modern office worker. Banbury and Berry (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2005), in a foundational study, showed that intelligible coworker speech is the single strongest distractor in the office, far more harmful than general machine hum. The mix works by masking: the spectrum of the masker (white noise + AC + city) overlaps the spectrum of human speech (especially in the 500–4000 Hz band that contains the maximum intelligibility), and the brain stops "extracting" speech from the background. By the same study this restores productivity to the level of an isolated office.
Use this mix if: you work in open-plan and suffer from conversations; you live in dorms or coliving; you have thin walls and hear a tutor next door; you are a parent working from home while children meet with a tutor. Play through headphones at 55–65 dB — enough to mask intelligible speech, not loud enough to cause acoustic fatigue. After 2–3 hours, take a break — sustained broadband noise tires the auditory system (Møller, Hearing Research, 2000). Pairs with Deep Work (for extra protection).
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ReduxSound v1.0.0
Ambient sound mixer for relaxation and focus