At the beginning of human history, the built environment looked very different from how it does now. It consisted of caves, huts and temporary dwellings before more permanent structures began to be formed from materials like clay, mudbricks and stone.
I invite you to participate in a brief exercise. If nothing else, it will improve your mood. You are likely sitting indoors at a computer, but I want you to allow your imagination to transport you somewhere else, anywhere in the world. Imagine yourself in the place where you feel your optimal self. Envision a place of beauty, a place that makes you feel inspired, at peace, relaxed, fulfilled and full of a sense of wellbeing. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? Now, close your eyes and take a few moments to imagine yourself in this place.
We’ve all recently experienced a hype cycle. The Covid pandemic swept the world, sending us home to work from our bedrooms, spare rooms and kitchen tables. Although the experience of working from home was uneven, a consensus formed: working from home worked. Indeed, for many tasks, including cognitively demanding, focussed effort, the home appeared to work better. In the words of Tim Oldman, CEO of Leesman, whose survey captured over 280,000 responses from employees around the globe: “It doesn’t say much of the average office when a space designed for living can support an employee better than spaces designed specifically for working.” With offices closed and businesses still functioning, pundits and social media feeds thus reached the peak of the hype cycle: “The office is dead!”
Our love of nature, and its subsequent health benefits, is a scientifically established concept known as “biophilia”. Soundscaping systems can bring intelligent audio to the built environment to combat stress and boost feelings of wellness, safety, restoration, and motivation.
Soundscaping allows your building to operate fluidly and make best use of available space. Buildings have become increasingly multipurpose, flexible, and digitally aware. For example, global demand for flexible workspaces increased 50% from 2014-2019.1
Healthcare, hospitality, and corporate real estate are plagued by distracting noise pollution, resulting in billions of dollars lost annually. Biophilic soundscapes are a verified alternative to traditional sound masking. They reduce disruptive noise, improve speech privacy, and have even outperformed traditional masking sounds in terms of speech masking.
Buildings can be too quiet. Speech privacy is a top priority for employees and a legal stipulation in some environments. Biophilic soundscapes can improve speech privacy with equal or greater success to conventional masking, with additional wellbeing benefits.
Real-estate portfolios lose billions of dollars every year through lost productivity, health, sales, and satisfaction due to noise and ineffective audio experiences. Soundscaping can combine human and space centric goals to improve a CRE portfolio’s commercial performance.
Unpleasant background noise damages talent retention by lowering employees’ job satisfaction and commitment, research shows. Biophilic workplace soundscapes masks noise pollution and promotes quality of life and healthy workplace design, which are deciding factors for your prospective employees.
In commercial real estate, creating spaces that foster both performance and well-being is more important than ever. A key factor that's often overlooked in this is the role of sound. Quiet Mark is a global certification program for the built environment sector, committed to improving sonic environments in commercial and residential spaces.
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