Soundscaping
Soundscaping, designed around how a space is used
A plain account of what soundscaping is, what it can do for a floor and what it does not replace.
What soundscaping is
The ISO standard defines a soundscape as the acoustic environment as perceived, experienced or understood by people in context. The same sound can be calm or annoying depending on what the listener is doing, so the design starts with the activity, not the speaker.
Soundscaping is that environment designed on purpose. Nature-derived sound is generated in real time, zone by zone, and shaped around what happens in each part of a building: focused work, collaboration, pause, and arrival.
It is not a playlist and it is not white noise. Each soundscape is built from many small elements, bird calls, water textures and subtle environmental sounds, each with its own timing and probability, so it never repeats. It is generated on an on-premise hub rather than streamed, so there is no loop length, and it responds to acoustic conditions, occupancy and the time of day through acoustic sensors. Acoustic data is processed into metadata for sound levels, frequency and events. It is not conversation recording.
Content can be composed for a specific place where that is in scope. Valeo Technology delivers soundscaping with Moodsonic.
The background layer
What is playing
Speech privacy is usually the first requirement, and the broadband bed is what delivers it. Like for like the speakers, cabling and installation are much the same, so we are often competitive with a masking-only quote. A modern masking system can track the room and equalise per zone, and so can this. The difference is what is playing.
A conventional masking system’s spectrum is set at commissioning and its material never varies. Soundscaping carries variation matched to the space: enough not to become a distraction in itself, never resolving into something you attend to. The full comparison, including where natural sound did not win, is on the evidence page.
What it is for
Three things, and they are different.
What breaks concentration in an open plan office is intelligible conversation, because it carries meaning your brain cannot help processing. Turning the floor down does not help. Making speech less intelligible does.
The useful measure is spatial. In a European installation measured before and after, distraction distance, the radius within which a conversation still pulls your attention, fell from fifteen metres to five. One measurement, one building, first-party client research.
Pleasantness is one of the two primary perceptual dimensions of an acoustic environment, and it is measurable under an ISO standard. Liking the sound, reducing distraction and improving speech privacy are different outcomes. One does not prove the others, so we measure them separately.
What it is not
Soundscaping complements acoustic treatment, isolation and layout. It does not replace them.
It will not fix a meeting room with the wrong glazing, a ceiling with no absorption, or a plan that seats the sales team beside the people writing the report. Masking of any kind is a mitigation, not a cure, and the evidence page says so.
What a project involves
We start by measuring rather than proposing. Then zoning, so each area supports what goes on in it; content design, deciding what a space should sound like and why; specification and coordination with the builder and the AV installer; commissioning in the finished space, not to the drawing; and, where in scope, a post-occupancy review four to twelve weeks after people move in. Zone behaviour after handover is changed in software, not by returning to the rack.
Where it works
Different settings for focus, collaboration, restoration and arrival, coordinated across one floor rather than one setting everywhere.
The sound of waiting areas, arrivals and staff spaces, alongside acoustic treatment, isolation and layout. We will not tell a hospital what its outcomes will be.
Soundscapes for libraries, classrooms and shared learning spaces, designed around the activity, the room and the learners using it.
What the evidence can support
Noise is the second most common workplace complaint at 47%, behind temperature control. In the one published head to head in an occupied building, run by a furniture manufacturer and not by us or our supplier, soundscaping was rated ahead of conventional masking on being overheard, on the experience of noise and on satisfaction with the content, and behind it on one laboratory measure.
The evidence is stronger for acoustic comfort, privacy and context than for broad productivity claims, which we do not make. Results are positive in some settings, mixed in others, and sometimes null. Every finding on the evidence page names its study and its limitation, including the trials that found nothing.
Start with your space
Send us a floor plan
Tell us how the space is used and what you want to achieve. We will develop a soundscaping proposal, outline the zones and provide an indicative cost, within one to two weeks. No charge, no obligation.
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