Audio
Sound Masking
A system that emits precisely shaped background sound across a ceiling to raise the ambient noise floor, making nearby speech unintelligible and improving acoustic privacy.
Masking does not cancel noise; it makes conversation stop being decipherable a few desks away. It matters most in open plan offices and in medical, legal, and financial spaces where overheard speech is a compliance problem rather than an annoyance. Properly tuned, occupants describe it as the room feeling quieter, which is counterintuitive given you added sound.
The whole value is in the spectrum and the uniformity. A masking system tuned by ear, or run at a flat level across an entire floor, gets noticed and switched off. It should be commissioned with a meter, zone by zone, and ramped in over days so occupants acclimatise.
Related terms
- NC Rating
- A single-number rating of a room's background noise level across frequency bands, used to judge whether mechanical noise will interfere with speech and conferencing.
- Ceiling Tile Speaker
- A loudspeaker installed into a suspended ceiling grid, used in distributed arrays so coverage is even across a room instead of loud at the front and thin at the back.
- RT60
- The time in seconds for sound in a room to decay by 60 dB — the standard measure of how reverberant a space is and how intelligible speech will be in it.
More Audio terms
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