Open Plan Office Spaces and Reverberation Issues

Modern, open-plan office spaces are beautiful for the most part and with freelancing becoming more and more popular so are co-working office spaces. These spaces are usually large, built with rather reflective surfaces in mind

What these specific designs leave is a large reverberant space which contributes to poor speech intelligibility and focus in workspaces. There is a whole range of studies and research into these fields which we will go in to in a following blog entry but below we will look at potential solutions to help alleviate these issues and create a more suited working environment.

Open plan office noise solutions

There are two areas to look at when looking noise issues within offices, Firstly office soundproofing looks more towards reducing noise transferring between rooms, office sound absorption looks at reducing reverberation.

Noise reverberation issues make your office feel cathedral-like and echoey or even worse as the office noise increases people naturally talk louder to speak louder than the office din making the problem worse until your office space becomes flooded with noise building into a big crescendo. In this post, we will be looking at reverberation treatments, not soundproofing options.

Speech Intelligibility

Speech Intelligibility is a rating in which looks at the clarity of speech in each space, whilst these are most important in the Education Sector they will hold significance in the office especially between teams when discussions are held throughout the day

Without a good understanding of speech, important information may not be conveyed and missed due to the noise levels or would require repeating multiple times – this is influenced by how reverberant a space is, with long reverb times this will become problematic and would need addressing. If this feels like your office read on and learn how we can model and measure reverberation so we can best eliminate it.

Reverberation Measurement

To give an accurate reading and response to these issues, you can have an acoustic test carried out which an RT60 or equivalent is specified. An RT60 is a measurement where a pink noise is generated for a specific length of time and immediately stopped (this is called the interrupted noise method) and you measure how long the sound takes to decay below 60dB – this length of time is the Reverberation Time.

This method will help you best analyse how to solve your office issue however it’s not essential.

Office Sound Absorption

Open-plan offices are awesome places to work and we don’t want to sacrifice their beauty if we can help it, so what can we do to stop this echo problem?

In the simplest terms, we want to add as much sound-absorbing material as possible. Dropping sofas, beanbags and hanging curtains everywhere might not be exactly on brand! so lets look at some aesthetic and functional options we offer…

Adagio

Adagio is a design-focused baffle which is hung from the ceiling to create not only a sculpture but to improve the acoustics by providing a rigid but non-reflective form to reduce reverberation.

Adagio packs a lot of sound-absorbing material into a small footprint. I’ts very well suited to board rooms and comes in 13 colours to suit your brand style!

Soft Note

Soft Note is a fabric-wrapped acoustic panel. The panel can be water jet cut to any shape and size and comes in 32 different colours. If echoes are plaguing your office this is an elegant and fully customisable solution that won’t affect the open plan feel of your office.

Octave acoustic baffle

Octave is a ceiling-hung acoustic baffle it’s tasteful design and choice of 34 colours make it a hit in any office space. From a functional standpoint you are installing a large surface area of sound-absorbing material which will help combat reverbration in your room.

Octave acoustic baffle

Beat is an elegant way to reduce sound reverberation in professional spaces. Do you have echoey cathedral-like meeting rooms or office spaces? This can lead to a cold clinical ‘hospital feel’ in a space where you want to offer a warm welcome to clients and customers. Or perhaps even worse you have an office or restaurant where voices build into a crescendo as people try to be heard over each other and the reverberation of the room.

Nude Note

Who’s looking at the ceiling eh? A highly effective (both cost and acoustic) solution is to install plain white acoustic foam on your ceiling. This has a huge impact on your room and not your pockets.

Got your own idea?

Most of our absorption products can be customised in some fashion so feel free to give us a call to discuss your plans. If all of this has you left feeling confused you can call and speak to one of our acoustic experts free of charge to help you wrap your head around your noise issues!

Speak to a human now! 01937 588226