Office ambience
Ready Mixes
Sounds
0Office ambience
Office Atmosphere is the soundscape of a typical open-plan office on an ordinary workday: the soft hum of HVAC and computer fans, distant keyboard tapping (five to eight people typing simultaneously), muffled phone voices at nearby desks, the occasional IP-phone ring, paper rustle, quiet steps on carpet. Overall noise about 55 to 60 dB, mid-range of what the WHO Guidelines for Community Noise (1999) call acceptable for mental work.
Paradoxically, open-plan offices turned out acoustically problematic. Banbury and Berry (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2005) showed that for most people the biggest distractor in an office is intelligible coworker speech, not general hum. It's the cocktail-party effect in reverse: the brain involuntarily extracts speech from the background and processes it as information, lowering productivity by 5 to 10%. In our recording speech is deliberately muffled and unintelligible; we kept only the office's sound texture without the cognitive load.
Use this track for remote work (for people for whom home is too quiet and a colleague-presence feel is needed), for writing office prose or satire, for focus practice in noisy environments (building tolerance to intelligible speech), or for business and work podcasts. Pairs with Café, City Noise (out the window) and Air Conditioner. Not for sleep or meditation; too many small events and the social load of background voices.
Included in Mixes
Related Sounds
Auto-off Timer
Alarms
Settings
Appearance
Audio
Timer
About
ReduxSound v1.0.0
Ambient sound mixer for relaxation and focus