September 7, 2024 • 49 mins
Evan Benway, a musician and the child of musicians, has been immersed in the creation and study of music since his earliest days. Through his deep appreciation for the evocative power and joy of sound, Evan understands how profoundly music can affect mood and emotions. However, in his professional journey, he discovered a stark contrast: sound is often considered a major distraction in traditional knowledge worker environments, especially in open floor plans filled with sound-reflecting materials like concrete and glass. Even in the most cutting-edge offices, unmanaged noise—particularly from people talking—can overwhelm other positive design elements. Evan experienced this firsthand and was struck by how unproductive such environments could be due to a poorly managed soundscape.
Traditional methods of sound management—absorbing, blocking, and covering, known as the ABCs of acoustics—are increasingly inadequate in modern office designs where sound sensitivity is high, and conventional solutions like carpets and acoustic tiles are less practical.
There had to be a better way.
Join me in welcoming Evan Benway to Work 20XX.
Evan founded Moodsonic to transform sound from a negative element into a positive force that enhances productivity, mood, and well-being. Moodsonic uses science-backed, biophilic sounds to create contextually relevant, dynamically generated soundscapes (with no loops) for built environments. Starting with offices and expanding into healthcare and educational markets, Moodsonic's approach brings the power of nature-inspired sound into these spaces.
Evan and his team are pioneering the use of dynamic soundscapes to improve people's experiences in built environments, leveraging the deep-seated biological impact of sound on attention, health, productivity, and well-being. At the same time, they carefully design these soundscapes to avoid the many pitfalls that poorly designed audio environments can bring.
In this episode of Work 20XX, we dive into the details, science, methods, and results of creating intentional soundscape designs that work in harmony with visual and other design elements to create better workplace experiences.
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(00:00):
You ready?
Evan, you ready?
Got your water so everything's good?
Let's go. Yeah.
All right.
In three, two, one.
Hey, welcomeback everybody.
Jeff Frick here
coming to you from the home studio
for another episode of Work 20XX.
And we’re going in kind of a different direction,
today, which I'm pretty excited about.
You know, there'sa lot of talk about well-being
(00:21):
and there's a lot of talk about,you know,
thinking of people as humansand they're not resources.
And how can you create an environment
for people to do their best work,
which is a very differentkind of standard
for what people are trying to do now.
And so I'm excited to havesomebody who's really involved with
something like setting the moodand what sets the mood more
than sound and music.
(00:42):
So we're excited to have joining us
from across the pond from Austria this morning
He's Evan Benway, the founder and CEO of Moodsonic.
Evan, great to see you today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
Absolutely. So let's jump into it.
So Moodsonic, give us just kind of a quick 101 to set the table
so people knowwhat we're talking about.
(01:02):
Yeah.
So Mood Sonic is all aboutusing the power of sound for good.
So we are,
a technology company.
We focus on creatinggenerative sound.
So methods of creating soundin real time, that can change,
that can respond,that can be interacted with
with a specific focuson the built environment.
(01:25):
So we do a lot of workin commercial offices.
This is sort ofthe first,
area that we went into
to really learn user problems,create better sonic experiences.
So we do a lot of work in offices.
We're doing more and more work now in health care and hospital environments
helping people to heal,
and then in educational spaces as well,
helping people to learn.
(01:45):
So we
it's all about adding sound for positive benefit.
Whereas historically soundsbeen sort of more of a problem,
more of a negative thing.
We're bringingabout some positives with it.
I love it.
So, you know, getting readyfor this, doing some research.
You know, you've notedin a number of your other episodes
that sound has historicallybeen rated as the biggest problem,
(02:05):
in office environments.
The biggest complaint, whether it'stoo loud, too frequent,
you know, I got a noisy neighbor problem.
So it's a really interestingapproach to try to flip sound
from being a negativeto actually being a positive.
So how did you kind of start to think about that,
and how do you start to think about
kind of active controlof sound to the positive
(02:27):
versus this pesky distractionthat keeps getting in the way
of me trying to get my work done.
Yeah.
Gosh.
Well, I guess for me,
it really starts as a musicianand the child of musicians.
So I grew up, with a lot of soundaround me,
a lot of really good sound,beautiful sound, evocative sound.
And I know we share that. Right.
(02:47):
And so, you know,a lot of
anyone who's really,experienced the joy of music
knows why this can besuch a great medium.
Sound can be emotive
it can affect us physiologically.
Give you goosebumps in a good way.
The unfortunate stateof affairs in commercial offices
and most of the built environmenthas just been such a negative.
As you say, it's the top thingthat people complain about.
(03:10):
And it's gotten to the pointin offices where,
where Leesman they've doneone of the larger studies
I've seen looking at,office workers globally,
and I've identified soundas the single biggest thing
standing in the way of peoplecoming back into the offices today.
So it's justwas astounding to me
when I got into this,
that sound was just such a problem.
(03:30):
And knowing from mybackground in music
that it has positive potential for us,
that's really where it all started for me.
That's great.
So there's lots of differenttypes of sounds,
and one of the themes that we see,
kind of more generically
in sensory support in officesis this concept of biophilic,
which I learned from Ryan Anderson at MillerKnoll
(03:51):
which is concept of,of bringing the outside in,
whether that's plants and,
and now you've gotsound as part of it.
So when I think of soundin the biophilic context,
I think of, you know, bird sounds or,
bubbling creek or whatever,
and then you've gotkind of music.
And then you have,you know, maybe
ambient sound that you're less conscious of.
(04:11):
So when youthink of kind
of the whole sound spectrum,how do you approach it?
Because you really got a big potential universe of,
of sounds to play with.
Yeah, yeah.So we do
there's a lot that you can use to create with
what we are
If you think about the environments
that I described where we are operating
offices or take a hospital environment,
(04:33):
but if we
if you look at the office first,which is where we went first,
you've got a relatively big space
shared by several people,
and something like music then,
can really easily become a problem of its own.
I think you and I might agreeon musical choices, I don't know,
but then I might play, like,some esoteric jazz music.
I happen to like that stuff.
(04:55):
It's going to be really disruptive to you, right?
So music's very powerful,
emotive in the way I described,but is very subjective.
And so it's difficult to use musicin a shared environment like an office
even in retail environments where music is used,
it's widely disliked.
So you can't reallyget away with music in offices.
You know, some startups will do it,
(05:16):
but eventually, you know, once they grow beyond a few people,
it doesn't really work.
That's one of the reasons we drawso heavily on biophilia,
not dogmatically or exclusively,but we use these sounds of nature
because you can designfor diverse groups of people,
sharing a space,doing different things.
So in an office, we often havesomeone who's really extroverted,
(05:38):
who sonically, you know,
they're going to benefit from some energy
from things like the birdsongthat you were describing.
While they might really like that,
and then we may havesomeone who's really introverted
or who's just trying to dosome focused work at that moment
and would find that type of soundto be distracting.
So biophilia generally
it gives us a nice palette of options to work with that
(06:00):
thanks to ourevolutionary biology.
You know, applies generally well to all of us.
And then gives us some tools aswell to vary it, to create nuance,
and different types of sonicenvironments for different, things.
One of the things I found interesting is,
your statement about humansperception to identify loops.
(06:22):
And I thought the funniest part was you said
you even did some experimentswhere you had a week long,
a single track, a week long.
No repeating within that week.
But if you played that over a period of time,
you know, people would very quickly start
to just naturally get bored of the loop.
Recognize the loop, knowthat it's 8:30 on a Thursday.
It's going to be,you know, ABBA, dance with me.
(06:44):
When you think of kind of
the conscious, perception of the sound
versus the unconsciousperception of the sound,
where it could bea potential, distraction
versus is there in support of these activities?
How do you think of kindof consciousness
in terms of should people hear the sound?
Should they not hear the sound?
Is it do they hear it
and then it fadesinto the background?
(07:05):
If they get into a
you know kind of a flow state, how
how do you think about the degree of consciousness
when people are inthis environment?
Yeah,
Great questions.
Yeah. So people willidentify loops.
I don't want to overstatethat scenario.
It wasn't everyone in that officethat identified the loops,
but there werea few people who did,
(07:26):
and those people were particularly sensitive to sound,
and it really was a problem for them.
So, you know, humans we’re amazing at recognizing patterns
even when they're not there.
Right?
We looked up at the starsand we saw,
all kinds of stories being told to us.Right. And so,
those same principles apply to sound
we don't want to create loops.
(07:46):
We don't want to create something that's going to
become a distractionor an annoyance to anyone.
So, yeah, it's a generallyit's a really good principle
to make sure that you're using
generative sound that's evolving, that's changing.
Now,
Yeah, there's this huge diversity
in how people respondto sensory stimuli.
Some people to,
will, will want tohear something
(08:08):
that's more active,that's more dynamic.
We'll find even thatthat can benefit them doing
cognitively demanding tasks likea bit of a positive distraction.
Whereas for someone else
who's really, you know, trying to do deep focused work,
sort of like your stereotypical, introvert
or someone who's on the autistic spectrum, you know,
someone who's hypersensitive,
(08:29):
will not find that distractionto be positive.
So there's quite a lot of variationwithin, a workspace,
you know, where we do a lot,where we try to,
you know, create asoundscape that's
going to work well for this diverse group of people.
That can be a bit limiting.
But then also, some of the things that we do.
So we're, we use, concepts like zoning.
(08:50):
So, you know,
you step into a particulararea of a building
and you can havea type of soundscape that's
more stimulating, that's brighter,that's more energetic.
And then if that's notnot the right fit
for the type of workthat you're doing
or the type of personality you have,
you've got some other options thatyou can go to in different areas.
Those are some of the waysthat we do that today.
(09:12):
Increasingly though to,
as we deploy more and more generative sound
and as it becomes,
more and more realistic to do truly real time generative sound of
these types of nature soundscapes that we're using,
you can introduce a lot more abilityto really personalize things.
So we, we do a lot of researchin trying to understand, you know,
(09:33):
what's yoursonic personality?
You know, what's your sono type,as we call it?
So as we increasingly know,
all right, we've got these people in the building,
they've got this mix of sensorysensitivities, and it's this today,
then we can create a soundscapethat's better for that.
For those people.
Yeah.
And just so people know,who haven’t done the homework.
(09:54):
So you create
you have a generative AI system where you're creating
fresh new soundsthat have never been created.
Obviously, you're pulling themfrom some track,
but thewhole idea is
you're generating it dynamically based on the demands,
of the condition at that moment in time.
It's not just playingtapes or playing CDs or,
(10:15):
you know, playing MP3 files.
You're actually generating new sounds
based on the dynamicsof the situation.
Yeah. That's right.
So we generateand it's not random generation.
You know, we introduce randomnesssort of within bounds.
Typically our user is not a sound engineer.
It's someone who may bea real estate manager
(10:36):
or an administrative user.
And they want to know somethingrelatively simple, right?
I want to know
this is going to help me relax, lets say
this is going to help,
you know, with sensations of pain,
maybe in a in a hospital
or this is going to be good fora collaborative ideation session.
That tends to bewhat the user wants out of this.
(10:57):
And so we use theconcept of a theme
whereby a usercan select the theme
that's going to do one of those things.
And then our generative engineis doing what you described.
So it's composing the soundscapein real time based on the logic
that we've designedfor that type of activity.
Yeah. Truly real time generation of sound too
(11:17):
is something we're working a lot on
that we're very interested in.
The truly real timegeneration of that is, a
we’re not rolling that out in officesor anything like that today.
Sort of the costof a hallucination.
If you think of like,you know
what ChatGPT can get wrong
in an audio systemin a ten story building,
would be really painful for us.
(11:38):
So, you know, wewe don't do that yet,
but that's, it's definitely,coming as well.
Yeah.
So, you know,challenges are opportunities
and it seems to
and you're addressing them.
But I also want to call them out specifically that
you've got kind of this [3x3x3] three by three by three,
you know super matrix.
You've got kind of variability in people
(11:59):
in terms of their sensitivity to sound.
What types ofsounds that they like.
You have kind of variability in activity,
even within those people, you know,what are they doing?
In the at, that moment in time.
And then you have kind of variability in space.
With different types of spaces that have different characteristics.
And all those things could be changing
(12:20):
all the time.
So it's a great opportunityto think about you guys can adjust,
but how do you
how do you kind of bucket itor is zones really the solution?
Because it's interesting.
Ryan Anderson, also from MillerKnoll has a great report years ago
that said, you know,
what are the three thingsbest done not at home,
better done at an officeor a third party location.
And one was, collaboration,which everybody always talks about,
(12:43):
you know, can we get togetherand collaborate on a project?
Second was just pure socialization, just really
trust building and relationship buildingand being together
and having projectswith that objective.
And then the third is heads down work,
because a lot of peoplemaybe have
busy houses or small houses or kids or whatever.
So, you know, they need a placeto go do, heads down work.
(13:05):
So those are all threereally different activities,
all taking placein offices
with very different, I would imagine,
requirements in terms of how you support those types of activities.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You're right.
I would say that all of that appliesto visual design as well.
Right.
So just aswith an office,
(13:27):
it's true, you can't predict exactly
what activity people are going to do
in a given spaceat a given time.
But we have spaces in officesthat tend to suit focused work well.
We have spacesin offices
that tend to be designedaround collaboration.
And there's been a lot of change
in how all of those thingsare designed
in the past few years, obviously.
(13:47):
And so that same thingapplies to sound.
And so I think,
you can think about creating spaces
that are more or lessactive, dynamic, energetic, with sound.
And that's partof what we do.
But also, yeah,these things change all the time.
Gosh,
it's very difficult for us, for example, to predict
when it's going to be loudor quiet in an office
(14:11):
or when it's going to be,
stimulating for someone who might behypersensitive to sound like,
someone who might beclassified as neurodiverse.
We do, a lot of long termmeasurement of the sound fields.
So we put sensors in place,
typically we're measuring, you know,
Where is it loud?Where is it quiet?
Where is it stimulating?
(14:31):
Where is it active?
And we use those as wellto adjust the soundscape.
Because you're right,
you can't really predictthat stuff very well.
In some parts of the world you can.
You know, in much ofthe Western world right now
we can say Monday and Fridayit's going to be relatively quiet.
But I'm just backfrom a trip to,
to Asia, where I wasin a number of companies
countries where that is not the case.
(14:51):
In an office that’s packed on a Monday and on a Friday.
But the soundlevels are not constant.
It really changes.
So the yeah
the soundscape,
any sound that you're adding to the space
really knowsneeds to know the context,
into which you're addingthat sound.
So are you activelylistening as well,
so you can make adjustmentsbased on the volume or the activity
(15:13):
in a particular room?
Yes and no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, we use
we're quite different from some companies that, you know,
listen and send audio places.
So just, you know,without getting too techie,
the way our system works,we use edge, processing.
So we don't send audio anywhere.
Devices don't capture audio.
(15:33):
They capture, metadata.
So things like, you know,is it loud? Is it quiet?
Do we have energyin particular frequencies?
And we do that because we want it to be useful.
We want to create bettersound scaping
We also,want to inform our clients.
So someone may want to come in
on a quiet dayand find a quiet place to work,
(15:54):
and we can provide that information
or actually, increasingly peoplewant to come in to collaborate,
as you're describing,
and we can help them find that.
We don't need to, record conversations.
We don't need to identify speech,any of that stuff.
So we've made a decisionas a company,
we explicitly don't do thatkind of stuff.
We use edge analysis,just brokering, with metadata.
(16:16):
That's what we use, to inform our system.
[Evan] So does that answer your question?[Jeff] and then adjust accordingly.
So you mentioned, visual design
and you talk a lot about using soundin a design context, right
to create these better environments.
And some of the stuffI was listening to
talked about the interplay between,
lots of design elements,not only the sound
(16:37):
but also the visual,and that we tend to over
index on visual just because it'sprobably our primary sense
for most people,and we just
kind of think that way.
But then there's all kinds of issue of
too much stimulationand conflict, and.
I wonder if you can share kind of how sound fits
within the context of all of the,
emotional connectorsor sensory inputs
(16:59):
to help create a better environment
for folks in thesewell designed spaces.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, so,
we don't perceive any of thesesenses on their own in isolation.
So while we are very focusedon sound as a company,
one's experience of a soundscape
can be impacted by what they see,by the temperature in the room.
(17:21):
Right.
So we experience everything inmultiple senses at the same time.
There's lots of researchthat's looked into this,
an example that sometimes helpspeople relate to this is
if you've ever done, like
dining in the dark,you go to a restaurant,
they turn offthe visual sense, right?
And it really can enhance,your sense of taste.
And in fact, sound toohas been used to do that, you know,
(17:44):
causing people to perceivethat a meal is saltier
by adding some ocean waves.
So there's a lot of interplaybetween our senses.
Sound in particularis different in some ways,
and I think it's related towhy it's such a problem.
Our sense of hearingreally is an alarm system.
This is, you know,one of its primary functions.
So sound is designedto immediately,
(18:07):
you know, triggera fight or flight response.
Even in the middle of the nightwhen you're sleeping, right.
We've all experienced this,
someone honks a car hornor, you know,
if you're traveling and then
the air conditioning in the hotelflips on, like those changes.
The dynamics really catch our attention.
So those are thingsto look out for.
These are opportunities
(18:28):
for a soundscape,then to
reduce some of the dynamics.
We're also very sensitive to speech.
Great evolutionary advantagein that if you can make sense
of what someone else is saying,maybe even at a whisper,
which you can,
like you can do without,
like most of the vowel soundsin my speech, actually.
And you can still make outwhat I'm saying.
(18:49):
I don't knowif you know that, if you,
it doesn't translatevery well over, over a video call.
But things likefricatives, sibilance.
So the ‘f’s and ‘s’s,
those types of really high frequency sounds
like that's what allows us to just
whisper and be understoodby someone else.
Great as an alarm system. Right?
As this aid for communicationin more primitive environments.
(19:13):
Now you bring peopleinto the office
with that type of thing, right?
And we're, we shouldn't be surprisedthat it's stressful for people,
and that we're easily distracted by speech.
So when people are complaining
that noise is thetop problem with offices
it’s actually specificallythe sound of other people talking.
Right?
That's grabbing our attention,interrupting our focus.
(19:35):
even for people who want to collaborate.
Because I know this is an increasing focus today for workplace design,
A really quiet background environment is sort of anti-collaborative.
A lot of people come into an office now
and there's maybe less of a babble than there would have been pre-COVID
because there are fewer people there.
And try collaborating in that room, right
(19:56):
when everyone else can heareverything that you're saying.
A lot of people find that to bea real problem
and a hindrance to to collaboration.
So these are all great waysin which you can use,
sound in that environmentto, to help.
It's funny you talk insome of your episodes about,
sound in the pastwas just treated as a problem.
And the solution was to mask itas much as you can.
(20:19):
And butyou also
there's some talk about these things.
Was it ‘anechoic’
I'll probably mispronounce it‘anechoic chambers’,
which is places with absolute no sound.
And we actually do need sound.
And it's funny when people you saygo in these chambers,
I think the world recordthat you could even
sit in one of these things,like less than an hour
or an hour and a half,whatever
you know, it's like tortureit’s like isolation
(20:40):
it's like, you know, the worstthing you can do to somebody.
So sound is actuallymore important,
even at an ambient level,than maybe we give it credit for
and no soundis not the solution, right?
Agreed.
Yeah.
I mean, you say torture,
right.
In ourcountry of origin,
you know, white noise, just broad spectrum noise.
(21:01):
Right?
Has been used,
all throughout historyto extract information from people.
Right.
You can torture people, with noise.
Unfortunately,our country of origin
also has loud buildingswith a lot of noise in them.
It’s a bit of a problemfor us to work on.
I live in, as you mentionedat the beginning of the call,
I live in Austria,
in a part of Europe where buildingstend to be very quiet.
(21:23):
So they don't have that noiseproblem, which is really good,
but they are sort of gettingtowards the anechoic chamber.
And anyone who's worked inlike a German or a Finnish or,
you know, your stereotypical Japanese office,
like those really quiet backgroundlevels are also,
pretty unnerving for peopleand certainly not,
not good for a collaborative environment.
(21:45):
Right?
So you also work in hospitalsand I'm just curious,
hospitals have a completely different
set of objectivesin terms of what
you're trying to accomplishwith the people
that are in the rooms, patientsand doctors and nurses.
And you've talked onsome of the other episodes.
I wonder if you could share,you know, some of the real
physical benefits that this type of,
(22:08):
I don't want to say therapymay be therapy, but, you know,
creating these environmentsactually has on people's physical,
attributes, everythingfrom breathing
to heart rate,all kinds of positive benefits.
When this is done well.
Yeah.
So, in hospital environments,
we know that soundis really very powerful.
That,
(22:30):
again, sadly, you know, it's a big complaint.
It interferes with sleep quality.
Right.
It really can negatively impactpatient recovery time.
But part of the workthat we've been involved in as well
shows that, soundwhen it's done right.
And a lot of biophilicsounds in particular,
you see majorphysiological improvements.
So you'll see heart rate slowing,
(22:53):
respiration slowing,
sort of returning to healthier levels, decreases in stress.
Patients in recovery settings
will feel less pain,
make fewer requestsfor pain medication,
and recover faster from routine surgeries.
So it's really powerfulfor the patient.
Also,
(23:14):
for me personally,one of the most overlooked areas
is really that waiting room,
not even justfor the patient experience,
but for the family memberor someone who's waiting.
I mean, I
we all have this experience.
I recently had the experienceof being in a hospital,
in a psychiatrichospital waiting room,
waiting to to see a loved one.
And oh my gosh,
the sounds that youhear there, anything but,
(23:37):
what they should be right to helpeveryone through that experience.
So from the patient experience
to physiologically improving, their, their stay in that hospital
getting them out faster with less pain medication,
there's very clear sort of return on investment on that stuff for the hospital
through to the patient experience too
(23:57):
where we can create environmentsthat are more private,
where things are not overheard,that shouldn't be overheard.
And where people aren't going in to visit a loved one or experience a surgery,
more anxious thanthey should be.
These are all really opportunitiesfor using sound.
Yeah. That's great.
And when an opportunity toto be able to take those learnings,
(24:18):
you know, and, and incorporateinto that to the office setting or,
or school setting, I'm curious
you do a lot of stuff in school settings as well.
Is there anything special
about the school environmentthat's different than hospitals
that’s different than an officethat you guys are seeing?
Yeah.
And we don't do as much in schools.
I'd say it's relatively new for us.
You know, we're actually onlya couple of years old as a company.
(24:38):
And we went first into offices
and then we've been doing more in hospitals.
We've done some stuffin some schools, some universities.
I mean, the thing that'sthe most different, I would say is,
you know,you do a lot of work in offices.
You run into just a certain amountof cynicism, right?
People coming into the officeand, you know.
Yes, noise is the number onecomplaint, but oh my gosh,
(24:59):
people complain about everythingin their office environment.
We were just working with,
a real leaderin real estate,
from a largepharmaceutical company,
and she runs the AsiaPacific region
an extremely successful, really visionary real estate leader.
And they rolled out this beautiful
new suite of offices, you know,Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai.
(25:24):
And it included a lot of visualbiophilia, a lot of plants.
And the first commentsthat they got from everyone,
it wasn't, you know, ‘Wow, what a great new office!’
Oh my gosh.
These plants, you know,they bring about
these physiological benefitsthat we know they do.
No.
The complaints were
worries that the plants were going to, cause more bugs inside.
(25:45):
Right.
So like in offices,
you get cynicism,you get complaints,
you know, people who doubt their own, you know, colleagues,
you don't have any of that in schools.
You know, we've done some stuffin elementary schools.
And there it's more, you know, the kids,
they want to get way more involved with,
our stuff,with our technology.
They want to be able to hack it.
They want toplay with it.
(26:05):
We've had kids in schoolsusing soundscapes for meditations.
We've done stuff to where we geta lot more, sort of experiential.
So we, we did a projectwith the school in Australia,
doing sounds that are,that are local, to that school
that are basedon local nature,
that help the kids to identify sounds and
identify birdsand things like that.
(26:27):
So I'd say generallythat's probably
the biggest difference is just,you know, the,
the different brain of the childcompared to the adult in the office
Well, you're at this really interesting intersection
between kind of emotional well-being
and physical well-being and well-being,
as I said in the intro,
is a really importanttopic these days.
Psychological safety,you know,
(26:47):
basically creating a comfortable environmentfor people to take risk
because that'show innovation happens
and that's how you move the company along.
But it is really interestingbecause it is kind of
this emotional touch baseinto the physical
that then both are supportiveof people's productivity.
I agree.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Yeah.
Very very cool.
One of the resultsof open floor plan,
(27:09):
which were supposed to be socollaborative back into the office,
is they're the noisy spacesand people are talking on the phone
and I'd haveno privacy.
And so everyone'sgot headphones on.
So you've got this kind of interesting dichotomy
where everyone was supposed to be collaborating in an open space,
and now it's just turned into
everyone is isolated in their own little headphone world.
How do you guys seethe world of the headphones
(27:31):
and kind of personal people tryingto get into their own flow state with
or whatever they're doinginside their, their headphones?
And do you guys integrate into that?
Is there a channelthat I can tap into?
And maybe evenalmost like a radio station
where I'm like, all right,I'm shifting into head down space.
I can't go to another space.
I only have my silly little,little space that they give me.
Have you started to give kind of individual choice
(27:53):
outside of the parameters withinthe, within the particular room?
Yeah.
So, our focus really is primarilyon the built environment,
the shared spacethat shared audio space,
because it's such a hard problem to solve.
And that's where we’re
That's our nichethat we're focused on.
I tend to think that when it comes to,
you know, you finding something to listen to on headphones
(28:16):
at a given moment,
that problem is solved.
I'm pretty sure, like,I don't know specifically, Jeff,
what you're going to listen toat that moment, but you'll find it.
I'll find it.
You know there's
we've got lots of optionswhen it comes to the individual.
And so I consider that problem
generally to be pretty well solved.
You know, we could debate the details of it.
(28:37):
People will tend to go to music.
And it's true, research will showthat any kind of music
is going to be detrimentalto cognitive performance.
You know, music with lyricsworst of all.
That said, for some people, if it's motivational,
if it helps them to get their job done at all, right,
like some people need something just to,
(28:59):
to be motivated enough to do work,
then I thinkit’s fine.
I think the problem is morewhat you initially described.
You've got an officefull of people.
We've now created an officethat's more about collaboration
than it was a few years ago.
Now everyone's coming inand wearing headphones.
That's a big problem.
I used to work, actually.
And in fact,this all started for me
(29:20):
when I was working at,
at the time, the world's largest,
headphone and headset, manufacturer.
And so I know this problemquite well.
When we went into one of the,you know, tech, company,
mega campuses and beautiful new campuses,
designed specificallyfor collaboration.
And that was theproblem statement, sort of.
(29:40):
Look what you've done.
Everyone is coming in
all of our engineers
who are supposed to be collaborating,
they're, you know,
using these headphones to say, do not disturb me.
And it's the mentally not collaborative.
And so, yeah, I think we need to address the,
the sound in the built environment.
That's what we want to do.
And then hopefully people using headphones,
you know it's it can
(30:01):
it can add to that.
But it's not a requirementjust to be able to,
to functionin the office.
Do your customerstrack that?
Are they tracking or kind of paying attention
of the use of,
of headphonesas a,
you know, kind of as a leadingindicator to show that people
are being more collaborative,
that they're more comfortablein the space because,
(30:22):
as you said, there's two reasonsto put the headphones on.
One is to give me some music
that'll maybe get me into a flow stateso I can get into my project.
But the other is, to you said is
is isolation.
Even if it's just signaling that it, you know,
don't talk to me.
You know, I might not even have any music on.
I might just be completelysignaling to people,
you know, ‘Don't talk to me right now.I'm busy. I'm heads down.’
(30:44):
Do you see a change in behaviorwhen people are suddenly immersed
in this different, dynamic,biophilic environment that
I don't, I don't need these anymore.I can take them off.
Yeah.We do.
So tracking it and trackingheadphone usage, that's hard.
At least for me, I think some ofour customers do track that,
(31:05):
you know, I'd love to get a hold of that type of data.
I don't typically have that
but yeah, we do see things
like increasesin collaboration,
changes in behaviors,those that we're talking about.
We have a lot of clientsmeasuring those.
We've been a part of a numberof studies where that's measured.
And yes, we can create an environment
that's more productive for people
(31:25):
it can accomplishtwo things at once, right?
You can take care of the introvert
or the person who's in an introverted mode
trying tofocus, right?
That first draft.
Right.
We can, introducesound into an environment
that's going to
reduce the intelligibility of speech
so they can focusa little bit better.
They're not as easily distracted.
At the same time,we can be introducing some
(31:47):
beautiful biophilia that's,helping with their well-being,
with their, you know, heart rate, respiration,
not well-being as a fluffy word, but,
you know, really helpingwith their bodies and minds.
And at the same time,that environment
is going to better supportsomeone collaborating.
They're not as disruptive.
Again, they're not as easily overheard.
And so people open up a little bitmore and collaborate more.
(32:09):
And yeah, that'sbeen borne out in research too.
That's me talking about it.
But when we've been a part
of a number of studiesto where that's measured
and we see measurableincreases in collaboration,
so people spending more timein these collaborative spaces
where soundscapinghas been introduced,
as well as,
doing things, that you want to seein collaborative behavior.
So coming up with more creative ideas,
(32:31):
novel creative ideas to challengingproblems, things like that.
So, yeah, it can have a big impact.
It's not the silver bullet,of course.
You know, the rest of the designof the building matters.
Also the acoustics,of the building,
is quite important as well.
You know we're not going to go into
a building where you've got, you know, 70dB of
(32:51):
of noise and, you know, surrounded by
brick and concrete floors and be ableto do much by adding sound.
But, you know, given those other things yeah,
it can have a significant impact on, on those behaviors.
I'm curious, do you ever introduce,like, noise canceling sound?
Just it just pops in my headis noise, you know,
as active noise canceling
has become such a much bigger partof all of our worlds
(33:14):
especially, you know,everybody loves them on airplanes
is where you reallyfeel the benefits, see the benefit.
Do you use any noiseactive noise canceling
on some crazysituation like that,
or is that just a completely different market?
Yeah.
It's,
I mean,I think it has applicability
probably to the same markets,the same environments where we're in.
Some people use active noisecanceling headphones.
(33:34):
Absolutely.
But I mean, do you, can use active noise canceling in a room?
Does the concept, does the concept transfer?
[Evan] Not really. Not yet.[Jeff] Not really, okay.
You know, you think aboutthe airplane use case, right?
Where your active noisecanceling is so useful.
You've got a lot of lowrumbling noise, right?
And when you flip the switchand you turn on your ANC
(33:56):
it's knocking out a lot of that low frequency stuff
where the wavelengths are,
simple and long enough for the microphoneon that's in the headphones
to be able to tell your inner ear
this is what your inner ear is hearing.
And it producesthe anti wave.
Right.
to cancel that noise.
It doesn't do as well with speech you may have noticed
(34:18):
where you've got high frequency stuff
right or other soundsthat are not low
low frequency noise.
It doesn't do as well.
And then that's also evenjust with a microphone
that's very close to your ear.
So then if you extend thisto the room environment
for me to cancel the sound,where you are,
I need to know where your inner ear is.
(34:39):
I need to get an anti noise signal to it
and not to your neighbor,because then he'll hear a weird artifact.
So it's notthat hasn't been cracked yet.
You know, and I think for probably for some time to come.
Okay.
So you mentioned it briefly, youknow, kind of your origin story.
How did you get started doing this?
What was your interest?
Where did you see an opportunity to,
(35:03):
to start the company
and really try to change the world of the internal, soundscape?
I was consulting with
a large audiocompany in California.
And then I joined the company
and I joined on the innovation side of the business,
and I was specifically looking at sound,
these problems that we were describing.
(35:25):
So this company served all the big,
companies and organizations of the world
and was running upagainst the issue.
That sound wassuch a problem.
This company to, they were called Plantronics at the time
ultimately became Poly and HP and,
and they had just built thisamazing new office.
So if you know them,they're in Santa Cruz, California.
Or they were at the time.
(35:46):
So, beautiful place,but over the hill,
quite a drive from Silicon Valley.
And so they had to reallycompete for talent.
And part of how they didthat was they created
a better workplacethan anyone had ever seen.
You know, they were growing their own food.
It was solar panelswith, you know,
free charging for the electric carsthat were being subsidized.
(36:08):
And, you know, gym and,
meals, it was, you know, they're doing a lot
to create good reasons for peopleto come into this office.
They’d worked with just about the best architectin the world on that.
And I came in on theinnovation side of the business
with a focuson sound
and with my background as a musician
and someone who thinks a lotabout how I experience sound.
(36:30):
I couldn't believe how unproductivethe environment was.
So that's really where it started for me,
you know, tasked with this, job.
You know, find out essentiallywhat we can do about sound,
trying to do that in an open office environment.
That, for me as someone who's fairly sensitive.
You know I found really,super distracting.
(36:51):
So it was the open office.
So they had all the amenities, but
but the negatives of the open officejust destroyed your productivity?
Yeah, yeah.
That's right, that's right.
And so I and I looked into sort ofwhat the state of the art was
and the state of the artsat the time was basically
It was described as the A, B, C ‘s.
Some people still talk about this,but the idea is
(37:12):
‘A’ absorb,
you know, wherever you can
put in absorptive materials,which is really good to do.
I'm a major advocate of acoustics
and putting in absorptive materials.
But, you know, a lot of our clientsare putting in,
more glass, they want to increase daylightingfor energy efficiency, for example.
They wouldn't dare put,
(37:32):
you know, carpet and ceiling tiles everywhere,
lest they completely fail to attractnew talent into the office, right.
So absorption was struggling.
‘B’ of the ABCs was block
put up walls, try and block the transmission of sound everywhere.
You know, the open plan has not,
has not gone that way, right.
We're not trying to build walls.
We're tearingthem down.
(37:53):
And then the ‘C’ of the ABCswas the idea that you should cover sound
And so cover up distractingspeech, introducing noise.
And so use broad band noise, like,
you know what the CIA or MI6 have used historically
to extract information, torture people.
You know, you won't be surprised to hearI'm not a big fan of that,
(38:13):
it causes stress too.
It increases cortisol levels.
And is not the way to go.
So that was
I was facedwith that
as sort of the solutionto the sound problem and thought,
come on, there's gotto be a better way than this.
I
We actually developed, the first commercial soundscaping product
within Plantronics, and then they merged with Polycom.
(38:36):
It was a really awfulbloody, merger.
At that time, too,I'd seen that we were
delighting clients with the soundscaping approach
and was ready to start a company of my own to do it the right way.
And that's how Moodsonic came about this.
That’s great.
Well, you know, Plantronics,originally their whole thing was,
you know, in-ear piecesand, you know,
(38:57):
portable ear sets and microphonesfor customer service people.
And, you know, we all got themeventually you could attach it to your
your little POTS phoneor your little digital phone.
And they were big on,
conference room speakers,the little three legged thing
in the middle of the,of the conference room
that everybody had.
It's interesting
their approach was really kindof isolating and individualizing.
(39:18):
You took a different approach,
really going after it from the room leveland the building level,
as opposed to trying toforget about all those things
we’ll just give you a better earphones, a very different approach.
Yeah, yeah.
Completely different.
Complementaryultimately,
because you can, as we described there
there are great opportunitiesto provide people with personalized
(39:38):
and individual experiencesusing headphones.
So I think complementary approaches.
But yeah,
if you watched what happenedto that company and their stock price
like it was the wrong timeto be coming up with an innovative,
you know, new, business unitwithin the company.
And so,
was very happy to,
to find a new home for that, for the idea.
Yeah.
So I'm curious now,you've been at it for a while.
(39:59):
What are you finding interms of people's reception?
How has it changed post-Covid?
When I think there is a lot more,
intentionality about the role of spaces.
Right.
And I think, you know, hopefully
at least it’s a big messagein this podcast.
You know, it's not about just having a space for people to go
check in,do their
their zoom calls and to do email, right
It's all about intentionality.
(40:19):
It's all about having a purposeto go to the office.
It's a lot about thosethose three activities
that we talked about and activity based spaces.
Has that been, you know, wind in your sails?
Are people now seeing that sound isis another really important piece
of this concept, again of,creating a space
for people to dotheir best work,
which was not I don't know that
(40:40):
that was necessarily the bar thatpeople were striving to before.
You’ll know more about that than me,but I tend to agree with you.
I don't think people were striving,or had to strive for that.
Many still probably are not.
And, my guess is they're not doinga good job of getting people
back into the office
other than mandating it right.
(41:02):
And so Covid for us
definitely, shined a lenson this a little bit,
you know, companies that
it opened the door for us, with respect to well-being.
Right.
Suddenly this was something that
not just Google was focused on, right.
But all kinds of companiesthroughout the world.
And so a lot of our clientsare companies that,
(41:23):
are actually reducingtheir real estate holdings.
So they're economizingon their real estate while
increasing the qualityof what they have.
So, a recent example,we're now a part of what's,
the healthiest officebuilding in the world,
just rolled out,
I think they've rolled out now eight floors of 12 floors,
in London, you know, fully soundscaped.
(41:44):
They've got lots of cool techin the building, right.
You can,
and I should saythis is part of a consolidation.
They used to have a slightlysprawling campus outside of London.
Now they've consolidated.
It's a smaller footprint,but it's central.
It's, you know, where you'dwant to do the shopping
and where you mightgo to the gym.
They have all the amenitiesin the office,
(42:06):
from sound to space planning and technology tools.
They've got it all.
They're giving people real reasonsto come in to the workspace.
It works phenomenally well.
I'd say those tendto be our clients,
companies that are doing that.
Not everyone isdoing that.
Obviously.
I think to, part of my experience through Covid
given my experience with sound,
(42:26):
you know, the fact that wethink a lot about the sound
and we experience, a lot of end users,
struggling withsound and
having their experienceimprove with soundscaping
going into Covid.
Pretty quickly, everyone was onlytalking about collaboration.
If you're going to do focused work,you're going to do it at home now, right.
And now the new office,if people are going to come in
(42:47):
it's going to beabout collaboration.
And people tendnot to actually work that way.
Right.
Like we don't just come inand do one mode all day long.
I certainly don't.
And this has beenborne out
most of our clients to there's
one of the things that,
a lot of our clients are strugglingwith the most, actually,
is an inabilityto focus in the office.
(43:10):
And you see this evidenced bythe growth of companies, you know,
producing pods, sort ofphone booths for people
to go into and work.
You have a lot of clients who,
you know, our engagement with them started because,
oh my gosh, we're just
we have to spend like $20,000to put one of these pods in.
Maybe we should do somethingabout the sound environment, so
(43:31):
So there's a lot more collaboration happening,
in this world post-Covid.
But, people still need to be ableto do their focused work as well.
And this has beena driver for us.
Yeah.
Well, the other piece that I wouldimagine would be a tailwind
that Covid did,is it just increased the focus
on the internal environmentinside the building.
You know, specifically morelike I said about HVAC,
(43:52):
once they figured outCovid was an airborne disease,
but suddenly everyone is like,you know,
do you have enough ventilation?
You know, are you focusing on that?
Are you checking yourCO2 levels?
While everybody's tired and falling asleep at 3:00
because the building isis full of CO2.
And when and I'm curious,on your Asian clients,
you said that are pretty much back,to full time back in the office.
(44:14):
Everybody's going back.
Do they now just see this as,
a way to improve theinternal environment conditions
versus the London example that you just gave,
which is more of a,
of kind of an active promotionof a very special thing.
Is it seen now as kind ofthe next logical way
that you canincrease the,
(44:34):
the livability of aninternal environment,
even if you're not really motivatedby just trying to get people there
you’re just trying to make ita better space.
Yeah.
So with the Asian clients,
I think I meant andfailed to make a point,
which was, you know,
a lot of the offices I visited, they're simply requiring people to come in every day
[Evan] So it's really a difference of choice. [Jeff] That's what I mean.
So if it's required,why spend the extra money?
(44:56):
Unless you're really tryingto think about ways you can make it
a better experienceas opposed to making it a draw?
Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.
And yes, I think that's one ofthe reasons they're doing it.
I mean, there are other things toothat are that are sort of helping with this
The WELL building standard,for example
has had a pretty big impact,
something that a lot of people,a lot of our clients are pursuing,
(45:18):
either directly as a certificationor sort of as a, as a signpost.
You know, they'refollowing that,
standard to learn abouthow to make better, healthier buildings.
It is about making more functional spaces.
Also, I'm just freshfrom this recent trip to Asia.
One of our clientswas in Hong Kong.
And they've got,you know, beautiful offices.
(45:38):
Looks right out over,Victoria Harbor.
And they did a lot to,
create this space that's central,that's easy for people to get to
that provides all the tech tools that they need.
But that also really just gives them
a better experience of theworkspace, and I think it's,
you can look at it cynically in saying they're trying to extract more, you know
productive output from their people, which is true.
(45:59):
But they're doing that by,you know,
making peoplefeel better, right?
Improving their attentionalcapacity throughout the day.
Um, and as part of that,
you know, you come in, you look out,
you can see Victoria Harbor,
you can hear the sounds of Victoria Harbor when you come in.
You know, they've just createda better workspace
that works better for people.
And, and yes,some of them are more,
(46:21):
you know, motivatedby the clear ROI
that they're getting from people.
Others are more focusedon well-being.
At the end of the day,it's the same result.
That's great, Evan.
Well, we're running out of time.
I want to give you the last word.
For people that haven'tthought about this,
how should they think about it?How should they approach it?
Or is there some really nice,clear examples where you can
(46:43):
you can demonstrate that, you know,this has a really positive impact
on people's well-being,which then translates
into their productivity, retention,everything else about how
they should maybe be thinking about the soundscapes
in their built environments.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I guess the best,and this is a complete like,
you know, pitch, butbut I'd say anyone who's interested
(47:04):
who wants to experience it,they should just
come into a buildingand have a listen,
come into a buildingthat we've soundscaped,
they can experience it fromfor themselves,
ideally spend some timetrying to work there.
But, yeah, we're rolling out, a number of,
showcases that are specificallyexperience centers.
And then we alsohave a number of,
(47:25):
clients distributednow throughout the world,
where we can bring people in, they can experience this
and have a listen.
So I'd say, yeah, best
best method for someone who's
who's interested issimply get in touch
we’d love for them to experience Moodsonic
Our biggest footprint rightnow, is in North America
and then, immediatelyfollowed by Asia Pacific.
(47:46):
We have a lot throughout Asian countries,
including Australia as well.
So yeah, anyonewho's interested,
should just, get in touch
and we'll give them something to listen to.
Awesome.
Well Evan, it's a really cool story.
And, it's one of these great,
you know, things that maybe people don’t think about
as terms of top of consciousness,
about how it canreally impact people.
At the same time, we all know how powerful sound is.
(48:08):
We all know how powerful music is.
It can translate youto different places in time.
It can set your mood,it could change your mood.
It can do so much for us.
So it kind of seemsobvious in hindsight,
but maybe it wasn't so obvious.
Looking forward and now with thisfocus on wellbeing and creating
the environmentfor people to do their best work,
what an important,piece of the puzzle.
So thank you very much for sharing the story.
(48:30):
It's been my pleasure.
Thanks for helping me to share it.
I appreciate that.
My pleasure.
All right.
He's Evan, I'm Jeff,you're watching ‘Work 20XX’
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
We'll see you next time. Take care.
Great.
Awesome. Well thank you, Jeff.
I really do appreciate it.
Thank you.
You ready?
Evan, you ready?
Got your water so everything's good?
Let's go. Yeah.
All right.
In three, two, one.
Hey, welcomeback everybody.
Jeff Frick here
coming to you from the home studio
for another episode of Work 20XX.
And we’re going in kind of a different direction,
today, which I'm pretty excited about.
You know, there'sa lot of talk about well-being
(00:21):
and there's a lot of talk about,you know,
thinking of people as humansand they're not resources.
And how can you create an environment
for people to do their best work,
which is a very differentkind of standard
for what people are trying to do now.
And so I'm excited to havesomebody who's really involved with
something like setting the moodand what sets the mood more
than sound and music.
(00:42):
So we're excited to have joining us
from across the pond from Austria this morning
He's Evan Benway, the founder and CEO of Moodsonic.
Evan, great to see you today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, it's a pleasure.
Absolutely. So let's jump into it.
So Moodsonic, give us just kind of a quick 101 to set the table
so people knowwhat we're talking about.
(01:02):
Yeah.
So Mood Sonic is all aboutusing the power of sound for good.
So we are,
a technology company.
We focus on creatinggenerative sound.
So methods of creating soundin real time, that can change,
that can respond,that can be interacted with
with a specific focuson the built environment.
(01:25):
So we do a lot of workin commercial offices.
This is sort ofthe first,
area that we went into
to really learn user problems,create better sonic experiences.
So we do a lot of work in offices.
We're doing more and more work now in health care and hospital environments
helping people to heal,
and then in educational spaces as well,
helping people to learn.
(01:45):
So we
it's all about adding sound for positive benefit.
Whereas historically soundsbeen sort of more of a problem,
more of a negative thing.
We're bringingabout some positives with it.
I love it.
So, you know, getting readyfor this, doing some research.
You know, you've notedin a number of your other episodes
that sound has historicallybeen rated as the biggest problem,
(02:05):
in office environments.
The biggest complaint, whether it'stoo loud, too frequent,
you know, I got a noisy neighbor problem.
So it's a really interestingapproach to try to flip sound
from being a negativeto actually being a positive.
So how did you kind of start to think about that,
and how do you start to think about
kind of active controlof sound to the positive
(02:27):
versus this pesky distractionthat keeps getting in the way
of me trying to get my work done.
Yeah.
Gosh.
Well, I guess for me,
it really starts as a musicianand the child of musicians.
So I grew up, with a lot of soundaround me,
a lot of really good sound,beautiful sound, evocative sound.
And I know we share that. Right.
(02:47):
And so, you know,a lot of
anyone who's really,experienced the joy of music
knows why this can besuch a great medium.
Sound can be emotive
it can affect us physiologically.
Give you goosebumps in a good way.
The unfortunate stateof affairs in commercial offices
and most of the built environmenthas just been such a negative.
As you say, it's the top thingthat people complain about.
(03:10):
And it's gotten to the pointin offices where,
where Leesman they've doneone of the larger studies
I've seen looking at,office workers globally,
and I've identified soundas the single biggest thing
standing in the way of peoplecoming back into the offices today.
So it's justwas astounding to me
when I got into this,
that sound was just such a problem.
(03:30):
And knowing from mybackground in music
that it has positive potential for us,
that's really where it all started for me.
That's great.
So there's lots of differenttypes of sounds,
and one of the themes that we see,
kind of more generically
in sensory support in officesis this concept of biophilic,
which I learned from Ryan Anderson at MillerKnoll
(03:51):
which is concept of,of bringing the outside in,
whether that's plants and,
and now you've gotsound as part of it.
So when I think of soundin the biophilic context,
I think of, you know, bird sounds or,
bubbling creek or whatever,
and then you've gotkind of music.
And then you have,you know, maybe
ambient sound that you're less conscious of.
(04:11):
So when youthink of kind
of the whole sound spectrum,how do you approach it?
Because you really got a big potential universe of,
of sounds to play with.
Yeah, yeah.So we do
there's a lot that you can use to create with
what we are
If you think about the environments
that I described where we are operating
offices or take a hospital environment,
(04:33):
but if we
if you look at the office first,which is where we went first,
you've got a relatively big space
shared by several people,
and something like music then,
can really easily become a problem of its own.
I think you and I might agreeon musical choices, I don't know,
but then I might play, like,some esoteric jazz music.
I happen to like that stuff.
(04:55):
It's going to be really disruptive to you, right?
So music's very powerful,
emotive in the way I described,but is very subjective.
And so it's difficult to use musicin a shared environment like an office
even in retail environments where music is used,
it's widely disliked.
So you can't reallyget away with music in offices.
You know, some startups will do it,
(05:16):
but eventually, you know, once they grow beyond a few people,
it doesn't really work.
That's one of the reasons we drawso heavily on biophilia,
not dogmatically or exclusively,but we use these sounds of nature
because you can designfor diverse groups of people,
sharing a space,doing different things.
So in an office, we often havesomeone who's really extroverted,
(05:38):
who sonically, you know,
they're going to benefit from some energy
from things like the birdsongthat you were describing.
While they might really like that,
and then we may havesomeone who's really introverted
or who's just trying to dosome focused work at that moment
and would find that type of soundto be distracting.
So biophilia generally
it gives us a nice palette of options to work with that
(06:00):
thanks to ourevolutionary biology.
You know, applies generally well to all of us.
And then gives us some tools aswell to vary it, to create nuance,
and different types of sonicenvironments for different, things.
One of the things I found interesting is,
your statement about humansperception to identify loops.
(06:22):
And I thought the funniest part was you said
you even did some experimentswhere you had a week long,
a single track, a week long.
No repeating within that week.
But if you played that over a period of time,
you know, people would very quickly start
to just naturally get bored of the loop.
Recognize the loop, knowthat it's 8:30 on a Thursday.
It's going to be,you know, ABBA, dance with me.
(06:44):
When you think of kind of
the conscious, perception of the sound
versus the unconsciousperception of the sound,
where it could bea potential, distraction
versus is there in support of these activities?
How do you think of kindof consciousness
in terms of should people hear the sound?
Should they not hear the sound?
Is it do they hear it
and then it fadesinto the background?
(07:05):
If they get into a
you know kind of a flow state, how
how do you think about the degree of consciousness
when people are inthis environment?
Yeah,
Great questions.
Yeah. So people willidentify loops.
I don't want to overstatethat scenario.
It wasn't everyone in that officethat identified the loops,
but there werea few people who did,
(07:26):
and those people were particularly sensitive to sound,
and it really was a problem for them.
So, you know, humans we’re amazing at recognizing patterns
even when they're not there.
Right?
We looked up at the starsand we saw,
all kinds of stories being told to us.Right. And so,
those same principles apply to sound
we don't want to create loops.
(07:46):
We don't want to create something that's going to
become a distractionor an annoyance to anyone.
So, yeah, it's a generallyit's a really good principle
to make sure that you're using
generative sound that's evolving, that's changing.
Now,
Yeah, there's this huge diversity
in how people respondto sensory stimuli.
Some people to,
will, will want tohear something
(08:08):
that's more active,that's more dynamic.
We'll find even thatthat can benefit them doing
cognitively demanding tasks likea bit of a positive distraction.
Whereas for someone else
who's really, you know, trying to do deep focused work,
sort of like your stereotypical, introvert
or someone who's on the autistic spectrum, you know,
someone who's hypersensitive,
(08:29):
will not find that distractionto be positive.
So there's quite a lot of variationwithin, a workspace,
you know, where we do a lot,where we try to,
you know, create asoundscape that's
going to work well for this diverse group of people.
That can be a bit limiting.
But then also, some of the things that we do.
So we're, we use, concepts like zoning.
(08:50):
So, you know,
you step into a particulararea of a building
and you can havea type of soundscape that's
more stimulating, that's brighter,that's more energetic.
And then if that's notnot the right fit
for the type of workthat you're doing
or the type of personality you have,
you've got some other options thatyou can go to in different areas.
Those are some of the waysthat we do that today.
(09:12):
Increasingly though to,
as we deploy more and more generative sound
and as it becomes,
more and more realistic to do truly real time generative sound of
these types of nature soundscapes that we're using,
you can introduce a lot more abilityto really personalize things.
So we, we do a lot of researchin trying to understand, you know,
(09:33):
what's yoursonic personality?
You know, what's your sono type,as we call it?
So as we increasingly know,
all right, we've got these people in the building,
they've got this mix of sensorysensitivities, and it's this today,
then we can create a soundscapethat's better for that.
For those people.
Yeah.
And just so people know,who haven’t done the homework.
(09:54):
So you create
you have a generative AI system where you're creating
fresh new soundsthat have never been created.
Obviously, you're pulling themfrom some track,
but thewhole idea is
you're generating it dynamically based on the demands,
of the condition at that moment in time.
It's not just playingtapes or playing CDs or,
(10:15):
you know, playing MP3 files.
You're actually generating new sounds
based on the dynamicsof the situation.
Yeah. That's right.
So we generateand it's not random generation.
You know, we introduce randomnesssort of within bounds.
Typically our user is not a sound engineer.
It's someone who may bea real estate manager
(10:36):
or an administrative user.
And they want to know somethingrelatively simple, right?
I want to know
this is going to help me relax, lets say
this is going to help,
you know, with sensations of pain,
maybe in a in a hospital
or this is going to be good fora collaborative ideation session.
That tends to bewhat the user wants out of this.
(10:57):
And so we use theconcept of a theme
whereby a usercan select the theme
that's going to do one of those things.
And then our generative engineis doing what you described.
So it's composing the soundscapein real time based on the logic
that we've designedfor that type of activity.
Yeah. Truly real time generation of sound too
(11:17):
is something we're working a lot on
that we're very interested in.
The truly real timegeneration of that is, a
we’re not rolling that out in officesor anything like that today.
Sort of the costof a hallucination.
If you think of like,you know
what ChatGPT can get wrong
in an audio systemin a ten story building,
would be really painful for us.
(11:38):
So, you know, wewe don't do that yet,
but that's, it's definitely,coming as well.
Yeah.
So, you know,challenges are opportunities
and it seems to
and you're addressing them.
But I also want to call them out specifically that
you've got kind of this [3x3x3] three by three by three,
you know super matrix.
You've got kind of variability in people
(11:59):
in terms of their sensitivity to sound.
What types ofsounds that they like.
You have kind of variability in activity,
even within those people, you know,what are they doing?
In the at, that moment in time.
And then you have kind of variability in space.
With different types of spaces that have different characteristics.
And all those things could be changing
(12:20):
all the time.
So it's a great opportunityto think about you guys can adjust,
but how do you
how do you kind of bucket itor is zones really the solution?
Because it's interesting.
Ryan Anderson, also from MillerKnoll has a great report years ago
that said, you know,
what are the three thingsbest done not at home,
better done at an officeor a third party location.
And one was, collaboration,which everybody always talks about,
(12:43):
you know, can we get togetherand collaborate on a project?
Second was just pure socialization, just really
trust building and relationship buildingand being together
and having projectswith that objective.
And then the third is heads down work,
because a lot of peoplemaybe have
busy houses or small houses or kids or whatever.
So, you know, they need a placeto go do, heads down work.
(13:05):
So those are all threereally different activities,
all taking placein offices
with very different, I would imagine,
requirements in terms of how you support those types of activities.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You're right.
I would say that all of that appliesto visual design as well.
Right.
So just aswith an office,
(13:27):
it's true, you can't predict exactly
what activity people are going to do
in a given spaceat a given time.
But we have spaces in officesthat tend to suit focused work well.
We have spacesin offices
that tend to be designedaround collaboration.
And there's been a lot of change
in how all of those thingsare designed
in the past few years, obviously.
(13:47):
And so that same thingapplies to sound.
And so I think,
you can think about creating spaces
that are more or lessactive, dynamic, energetic, with sound.
And that's partof what we do.
But also, yeah,these things change all the time.
Gosh,
it's very difficult for us, for example, to predict
when it's going to be loudor quiet in an office
(14:11):
or when it's going to be,
stimulating for someone who might behypersensitive to sound like,
someone who might beclassified as neurodiverse.
We do, a lot of long termmeasurement of the sound fields.
So we put sensors in place,
typically we're measuring, you know,
Where is it loud?Where is it quiet?
Where is it stimulating?
(14:31):
Where is it active?
And we use those as wellto adjust the soundscape.
Because you're right,
you can't really predictthat stuff very well.
In some parts of the world you can.
You know, in much ofthe Western world right now
we can say Monday and Fridayit's going to be relatively quiet.
But I'm just backfrom a trip to,
to Asia, where I wasin a number of companies
countries where that is not the case.
(14:51):
In an office that’s packed on a Monday and on a Friday.
But the soundlevels are not constant.
It really changes.
So the yeah
the soundscape,
any sound that you're adding to the space
really knowsneeds to know the context,
into which you're addingthat sound.
So are you activelylistening as well,
so you can make adjustmentsbased on the volume or the activity
(15:13):
in a particular room?
Yes and no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I mean, we use
we're quite different from some companies that, you know,
listen and send audio places.
So just, you know,without getting too techie,
the way our system works,we use edge, processing.
So we don't send audio anywhere.
Devices don't capture audio.
(15:33):
They capture, metadata.
So things like, you know,is it loud? Is it quiet?
Do we have energyin particular frequencies?
And we do that because we want it to be useful.
We want to create bettersound scaping
We also,want to inform our clients.
So someone may want to come in
on a quiet dayand find a quiet place to work,
(15:54):
and we can provide that information
or actually, increasingly peoplewant to come in to collaborate,
as you're describing,
and we can help them find that.
We don't need to, record conversations.
We don't need to identify speech,any of that stuff.
So we've made a decisionas a company,
we explicitly don't do thatkind of stuff.
We use edge analysis,just brokering, with metadata.
(16:16):
That's what we use, to inform our system.
[Evan] So does that answer your question?[Jeff] and then adjust accordingly.
So you mentioned, visual design
and you talk a lot about using soundin a design context, right
to create these better environments.
And some of the stuffI was listening to
talked about the interplay between,
lots of design elements,not only the sound
(16:37):
but also the visual,and that we tend to over
index on visual just because it'sprobably our primary sense
for most people,and we just
kind of think that way.
But then there's all kinds of issue of
too much stimulationand conflict, and.
I wonder if you can share kind of how sound fits
within the context of all of the,
emotional connectorsor sensory inputs
(16:59):
to help create a better environment
for folks in thesewell designed spaces.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, so,
we don't perceive any of thesesenses on their own in isolation.
So while we are very focusedon sound as a company,
one's experience of a soundscape
can be impacted by what they see,by the temperature in the room.
(17:21):
Right.
So we experience everything inmultiple senses at the same time.
There's lots of researchthat's looked into this,
an example that sometimes helpspeople relate to this is
if you've ever done, like
dining in the dark,you go to a restaurant,
they turn offthe visual sense, right?
And it really can enhance,your sense of taste.
And in fact, sound toohas been used to do that, you know,
(17:44):
causing people to perceivethat a meal is saltier
by adding some ocean waves.
So there's a lot of interplaybetween our senses.
Sound in particularis different in some ways,
and I think it's related towhy it's such a problem.
Our sense of hearingreally is an alarm system.
This is, you know,one of its primary functions.
So sound is designedto immediately,
(18:07):
you know, triggera fight or flight response.
Even in the middle of the nightwhen you're sleeping, right.
We've all experienced this,
someone honks a car hornor, you know,
if you're traveling and then
the air conditioning in the hotelflips on, like those changes.
The dynamics really catch our attention.
So those are thingsto look out for.
These are opportunities
(18:28):
for a soundscape,then to
reduce some of the dynamics.
We're also very sensitive to speech.
Great evolutionary advantagein that if you can make sense
of what someone else is saying,maybe even at a whisper,
which you can,
like you can do without,
like most of the vowel soundsin my speech, actually.
And you can still make outwhat I'm saying.
(18:49):
I don't knowif you know that, if you,
it doesn't translatevery well over, over a video call.
But things likefricatives, sibilance.
So the ‘f’s and ‘s’s,
those types of really high frequency sounds
like that's what allows us to just
whisper and be understoodby someone else.
Great as an alarm system. Right?
As this aid for communicationin more primitive environments.
(19:13):
Now you bring peopleinto the office
with that type of thing, right?
And we're, we shouldn't be surprisedthat it's stressful for people,
and that we're easily distracted by speech.
So when people are complaining
that noise is thetop problem with offices
it’s actually specificallythe sound of other people talking.
Right?
That's grabbing our attention,interrupting our focus.
(19:35):
even for people who want to collaborate.
Because I know this is an increasing focus today for workplace design,
A really quiet background environment is sort of anti-collaborative.
A lot of people come into an office now
and there's maybe less of a babble than there would have been pre-COVID
because there are fewer people there.
And try collaborating in that room, right
(19:56):
when everyone else can heareverything that you're saying.
A lot of people find that to bea real problem
and a hindrance to to collaboration.
So these are all great waysin which you can use,
sound in that environmentto, to help.
It's funny you talk insome of your episodes about,
sound in the pastwas just treated as a problem.
And the solution was to mask itas much as you can.
(20:19):
And butyou also
there's some talk about these things.
Was it ‘anechoic’
I'll probably mispronounce it‘anechoic chambers’,
which is places with absolute no sound.
And we actually do need sound.
And it's funny when people you saygo in these chambers,
I think the world recordthat you could even
sit in one of these things,like less than an hour
or an hour and a half,whatever
you know, it's like tortureit’s like isolation
(20:40):
it's like, you know, the worstthing you can do to somebody.
So sound is actuallymore important,
even at an ambient level,than maybe we give it credit for
and no soundis not the solution, right?
Agreed.
Yeah.
I mean, you say torture,
right.
In ourcountry of origin,
you know, white noise, just broad spectrum noise.
(21:01):
Right?
Has been used,
all throughout historyto extract information from people.
Right.
You can torture people, with noise.
Unfortunately,our country of origin
also has loud buildingswith a lot of noise in them.
It’s a bit of a problemfor us to work on.
I live in, as you mentionedat the beginning of the call,
I live in Austria,
in a part of Europe where buildingstend to be very quiet.
(21:23):
So they don't have that noiseproblem, which is really good,
but they are sort of gettingtowards the anechoic chamber.
And anyone who's worked inlike a German or a Finnish or,
you know, your stereotypical Japanese office,
like those really quiet backgroundlevels are also,
pretty unnerving for peopleand certainly not,
not good for a collaborative environment.
(21:45):
Right?
So you also work in hospitalsand I'm just curious,
hospitals have a completely different
set of objectivesin terms of what
you're trying to accomplishwith the people
that are in the rooms, patientsand doctors and nurses.
And you've talked onsome of the other episodes.
I wonder if you could share,you know, some of the real
physical benefits that this type of,
(22:08):
I don't want to say therapymay be therapy, but, you know,
creating these environmentsactually has on people's physical,
attributes, everythingfrom breathing
to heart rate,all kinds of positive benefits.
When this is done well.
Yeah.
So, in hospital environments,
we know that soundis really very powerful.
That,
(22:30):
again, sadly, you know, it's a big complaint.
It interferes with sleep quality.
Right.
It really can negatively impactpatient recovery time.
But part of the workthat we've been involved in as well
shows that, soundwhen it's done right.
And a lot of biophilicsounds in particular,
you see majorphysiological improvements.
So you'll see heart rate slowing,
(22:53):
respiration slowing,
sort of returning to healthier levels, decreases in stress.
Patients in recovery settings
will feel less pain,
make fewer requestsfor pain medication,
and recover faster from routine surgeries.
So it's really powerfulfor the patient.
Also,
(23:14):
for me personally,one of the most overlooked areas
is really that waiting room,
not even justfor the patient experience,
but for the family memberor someone who's waiting.
I mean, I
we all have this experience.
I recently had the experienceof being in a hospital,
in a psychiatrichospital waiting room,
waiting to to see a loved one.
And oh my gosh,
the sounds that youhear there, anything but,
(23:37):
what they should be right to helpeveryone through that experience.
So from the patient experience
to physiologically improving, their, their stay in that hospital
getting them out faster with less pain medication,
there's very clear sort of return on investment on that stuff for the hospital
through to the patient experience too
(23:57):
where we can create environmentsthat are more private,
where things are not overheard,that shouldn't be overheard.
And where people aren't going in to visit a loved one or experience a surgery,
more anxious thanthey should be.
These are all really opportunitiesfor using sound.
Yeah. That's great.
And when an opportunity toto be able to take those learnings,
(24:18):
you know, and, and incorporateinto that to the office setting or,
or school setting, I'm curious
you do a lot of stuff in school settings as well.
Is there anything special
about the school environmentthat's different than hospitals
that’s different than an officethat you guys are seeing?
Yeah.
And we don't do as much in schools.
I'd say it's relatively new for us.
You know, we're actually onlya couple of years old as a company.
(24:38):
And we went first into offices
and then we've been doing more in hospitals.
We've done some stuffin some schools, some universities.
I mean, the thing that'sthe most different, I would say is,
you know,you do a lot of work in offices.
You run into just a certain amountof cynicism, right?
People coming into the officeand, you know.
Yes, noise is the number onecomplaint, but oh my gosh,
(24:59):
people complain about everythingin their office environment.
We were just working with,
a real leaderin real estate,
from a largepharmaceutical company,
and she runs the AsiaPacific region
an extremely successful, really visionary real estate leader.
And they rolled out this beautiful
new suite of offices, you know,Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai.
(25:24):
And it included a lot of visualbiophilia, a lot of plants.
And the first commentsthat they got from everyone,
it wasn't, you know, ‘Wow, what a great new office!’
Oh my gosh.
These plants, you know,they bring about
these physiological benefitsthat we know they do.
No.
The complaints were
worries that the plants were going to, cause more bugs inside.
(25:45):
Right.
So like in offices,
you get cynicism,you get complaints,
you know, people who doubt their own, you know, colleagues,
you don't have any of that in schools.
You know, we've done some stuffin elementary schools.
And there it's more, you know, the kids,
they want to get way more involved with,
our stuff,with our technology.
They want to be able to hack it.
They want toplay with it.
(26:05):
We've had kids in schoolsusing soundscapes for meditations.
We've done stuff to where we geta lot more, sort of experiential.
So we, we did a projectwith the school in Australia,
doing sounds that are,that are local, to that school
that are basedon local nature,
that help the kids to identify sounds and
identify birdsand things like that.
(26:27):
So I'd say generallythat's probably
the biggest difference is just,you know, the,
the different brain of the childcompared to the adult in the office
Well, you're at this really interesting intersection
between kind of emotional well-being
and physical well-being and well-being,
as I said in the intro,
is a really importanttopic these days.
Psychological safety,you know,
(26:47):
basically creating a comfortable environmentfor people to take risk
because that'show innovation happens
and that's how you move the company along.
But it is really interestingbecause it is kind of
this emotional touch baseinto the physical
that then both are supportiveof people's productivity.
I agree.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Yeah.
Very very cool.
One of the resultsof open floor plan,
(27:09):
which were supposed to be socollaborative back into the office,
is they're the noisy spacesand people are talking on the phone
and I'd haveno privacy.
And so everyone'sgot headphones on.
So you've got this kind of interesting dichotomy
where everyone was supposed to be collaborating in an open space,
and now it's just turned into
everyone is isolated in their own little headphone world.
How do you guys seethe world of the headphones
(27:31):
and kind of personal people tryingto get into their own flow state with
or whatever they're doinginside their, their headphones?
And do you guys integrate into that?
Is there a channelthat I can tap into?
And maybe evenalmost like a radio station
where I'm like, all right,I'm shifting into head down space.
I can't go to another space.
I only have my silly little,little space that they give me.
Have you started to give kind of individual choice
(27:53):
outside of the parameters withinthe, within the particular room?
Yeah.
So, our focus really is primarilyon the built environment,
the shared spacethat shared audio space,
because it's such a hard problem to solve.
And that's where we’re
That's our nichethat we're focused on.
I tend to think that when it comes to,
you know, you finding something to listen to on headphones
(28:16):
at a given moment,
that problem is solved.
I'm pretty sure, like,I don't know specifically, Jeff,
what you're going to listen toat that moment, but you'll find it.
I'll find it.
You know there's
we've got lots of optionswhen it comes to the individual.
And so I consider that problem
generally to be pretty well solved.
You know, we could debate the details of it.
(28:37):
People will tend to go to music.
And it's true, research will showthat any kind of music
is going to be detrimentalto cognitive performance.
You know, music with lyricsworst of all.
That said, for some people, if it's motivational,
if it helps them to get their job done at all, right,
like some people need something just to,
(28:59):
to be motivated enough to do work,
then I thinkit’s fine.
I think the problem is morewhat you initially described.
You've got an officefull of people.
We've now created an officethat's more about collaboration
than it was a few years ago.
Now everyone's coming inand wearing headphones.
That's a big problem.
I used to work, actually.
And in fact,this all started for me
(29:20):
when I was working at,
at the time, the world's largest,
headphone and headset, manufacturer.
And so I know this problemquite well.
When we went into one of the,you know, tech, company,
mega campuses and beautiful new campuses,
designed specificallyfor collaboration.
And that was theproblem statement, sort of.
(29:40):
Look what you've done.
Everyone is coming in
all of our engineers
who are supposed to be collaborating,
they're, you know,
using these headphones to say, do not disturb me.
And it's the mentally not collaborative.
And so, yeah, I think we need to address the,
the sound in the built environment.
That's what we want to do.
And then hopefully people using headphones,
you know it's it can
(30:01):
it can add to that.
But it's not a requirementjust to be able to,
to functionin the office.
Do your customerstrack that?
Are they tracking or kind of paying attention
of the use of,
of headphonesas a,
you know, kind of as a leadingindicator to show that people
are being more collaborative,
that they're more comfortablein the space because,
(30:22):
as you said, there's two reasonsto put the headphones on.
One is to give me some music
that'll maybe get me into a flow stateso I can get into my project.
But the other is, to you said is
is isolation.
Even if it's just signaling that it, you know,
don't talk to me.
You know, I might not even have any music on.
I might just be completelysignaling to people,
you know, ‘Don't talk to me right now.I'm busy. I'm heads down.’
(30:44):
Do you see a change in behaviorwhen people are suddenly immersed
in this different, dynamic,biophilic environment that
I don't, I don't need these anymore.I can take them off.
Yeah.We do.
So tracking it and trackingheadphone usage, that's hard.
At least for me, I think some ofour customers do track that,
(31:05):
you know, I'd love to get a hold of that type of data.
I don't typically have that
but yeah, we do see things
like increasesin collaboration,
changes in behaviors,those that we're talking about.
We have a lot of clientsmeasuring those.
We've been a part of a numberof studies where that's measured.
And yes, we can create an environment
that's more productive for people
(31:25):
it can accomplishtwo things at once, right?
You can take care of the introvert
or the person who's in an introverted mode
trying tofocus, right?
That first draft.
Right.
We can, introducesound into an environment
that's going to
reduce the intelligibility of speech
so they can focusa little bit better.
They're not as easily distracted.
At the same time,we can be introducing some
(31:47):
beautiful biophilia that's,helping with their well-being,
with their, you know, heart rate, respiration,
not well-being as a fluffy word, but,
you know, really helpingwith their bodies and minds.
And at the same time,that environment
is going to better supportsomeone collaborating.
They're not as disruptive.
Again, they're not as easily overheard.
And so people open up a little bitmore and collaborate more.
(32:09):
And yeah, that'sbeen borne out in research too.
That's me talking about it.
But when we've been a part
of a number of studiesto where that's measured
and we see measurableincreases in collaboration,
so people spending more timein these collaborative spaces
where soundscapinghas been introduced,
as well as,
doing things, that you want to seein collaborative behavior.
So coming up with more creative ideas,
(32:31):
novel creative ideas to challengingproblems, things like that.
So, yeah, it can have a big impact.
It's not the silver bullet,of course.
You know, the rest of the designof the building matters.
Also the acoustics,of the building,
is quite important as well.
You know we're not going to go into
a building where you've got, you know, 70dB of
(32:51):
of noise and, you know, surrounded by
brick and concrete floors and be ableto do much by adding sound.
But, you know, given those other things yeah,
it can have a significant impact on, on those behaviors.
I'm curious, do you ever introduce,like, noise canceling sound?
Just it just pops in my headis noise, you know,
as active noise canceling
has become such a much bigger partof all of our worlds
(33:14):
especially, you know,everybody loves them on airplanes
is where you reallyfeel the benefits, see the benefit.
Do you use any noiseactive noise canceling
on some crazysituation like that,
or is that just a completely different market?
Yeah.
It's,
I mean,I think it has applicability
probably to the same markets,the same environments where we're in.
Some people use active noisecanceling headphones.
(33:34):
Absolutely.
But I mean, do you, can use active noise canceling in a room?
Does the concept, does the concept transfer?
[Evan] Not really. Not yet.[Jeff] Not really, okay.
You know, you think aboutthe airplane use case, right?
Where your active noisecanceling is so useful.
You've got a lot of lowrumbling noise, right?
And when you flip the switchand you turn on your ANC
(33:56):
it's knocking out a lot of that low frequency stuff
where the wavelengths are,
simple and long enough for the microphoneon that's in the headphones
to be able to tell your inner ear
this is what your inner ear is hearing.
And it producesthe anti wave.
Right.
to cancel that noise.
It doesn't do as well with speech you may have noticed
(34:18):
where you've got high frequency stuff
right or other soundsthat are not low
low frequency noise.
It doesn't do as well.
And then that's also evenjust with a microphone
that's very close to your ear.
So then if you extend thisto the room environment
for me to cancel the sound,where you are,
I need to know where your inner ear is.
(34:39):
I need to get an anti noise signal to it
and not to your neighbor,because then he'll hear a weird artifact.
So it's notthat hasn't been cracked yet.
You know, and I think for probably for some time to come.
Okay.
So you mentioned it briefly, youknow, kind of your origin story.
How did you get started doing this?
What was your interest?
Where did you see an opportunity to,
(35:03):
to start the company
and really try to change the world of the internal, soundscape?
I was consulting with
a large audiocompany in California.
And then I joined the company
and I joined on the innovation side of the business,
and I was specifically looking at sound,
these problems that we were describing.
(35:25):
So this company served all the big,
companies and organizations of the world
and was running upagainst the issue.
That sound wassuch a problem.
This company to, they were called Plantronics at the time
ultimately became Poly and HP and,
and they had just built thisamazing new office.
So if you know them,they're in Santa Cruz, California.
Or they were at the time.
(35:46):
So, beautiful place,but over the hill,
quite a drive from Silicon Valley.
And so they had to reallycompete for talent.
And part of how they didthat was they created
a better workplacethan anyone had ever seen.
You know, they were growing their own food.
It was solar panelswith, you know,
free charging for the electric carsthat were being subsidized.
(36:08):
And, you know, gym and,
meals, it was, you know, they're doing a lot
to create good reasons for peopleto come into this office.
They’d worked with just about the best architectin the world on that.
And I came in on theinnovation side of the business
with a focuson sound
and with my background as a musician
and someone who thinks a lotabout how I experience sound.
(36:30):
I couldn't believe how unproductivethe environment was.
So that's really where it started for me,
you know, tasked with this, job.
You know, find out essentiallywhat we can do about sound,
trying to do that in an open office environment.
That, for me as someone who's fairly sensitive.
You know I found really,super distracting.
(36:51):
So it was the open office.
So they had all the amenities, but
but the negatives of the open officejust destroyed your productivity?
Yeah, yeah.
That's right, that's right.
And so I and I looked into sort ofwhat the state of the art was
and the state of the artsat the time was basically
It was described as the A, B, C ‘s.
Some people still talk about this,but the idea is
(37:12):
‘A’ absorb,
you know, wherever you can
put in absorptive materials,which is really good to do.
I'm a major advocate of acoustics
and putting in absorptive materials.
But, you know, a lot of our clientsare putting in,
more glass, they want to increase daylightingfor energy efficiency, for example.
They wouldn't dare put,
(37:32):
you know, carpet and ceiling tiles everywhere,
lest they completely fail to attractnew talent into the office, right.
So absorption was struggling.
‘B’ of the ABCs was block
put up walls, try and block the transmission of sound everywhere.
You know, the open plan has not,
has not gone that way, right.
We're not trying to build walls.
We're tearingthem down.
(37:53):
And then the ‘C’ of the ABCswas the idea that you should cover sound
And so cover up distractingspeech, introducing noise.
And so use broad band noise, like,
you know what the CIA or MI6 have used historically
to extract information, torture people.
You know, you won't be surprised to hearI'm not a big fan of that,
(38:13):
it causes stress too.
It increases cortisol levels.
And is not the way to go.
So that was
I was facedwith that
as sort of the solutionto the sound problem and thought,
come on, there's gotto be a better way than this.
I
We actually developed, the first commercial soundscaping product
within Plantronics, and then they merged with Polycom.
(38:36):
It was a really awfulbloody, merger.
At that time, too,I'd seen that we were
delighting clients with the soundscaping approach
and was ready to start a company of my own to do it the right way.
And that's how Moodsonic came about this.
That’s great.
Well, you know, Plantronics,originally their whole thing was,
you know, in-ear piecesand, you know,
(38:57):
portable ear sets and microphonesfor customer service people.
And, you know, we all got themeventually you could attach it to your
your little POTS phoneor your little digital phone.
And they were big on,
conference room speakers,the little three legged thing
in the middle of the,of the conference room
that everybody had.
It's interesting
their approach was really kindof isolating and individualizing.
(39:18):
You took a different approach,
really going after it from the room leveland the building level,
as opposed to trying toforget about all those things
we’ll just give you a better earphones, a very different approach.
Yeah, yeah.
Completely different.
Complementaryultimately,
because you can, as we described there
there are great opportunitiesto provide people with personalized
(39:38):
and individual experiencesusing headphones.
So I think complementary approaches.
But yeah,
if you watched what happenedto that company and their stock price
like it was the wrong timeto be coming up with an innovative,
you know, new, business unitwithin the company.
And so,
was very happy to,
to find a new home for that, for the idea.
Yeah.
So I'm curious now,you've been at it for a while.
(39:59):
What are you finding interms of people's reception?
How has it changed post-Covid?
When I think there is a lot more,
intentionality about the role of spaces.
Right.
And I think, you know, hopefully
at least it’s a big messagein this podcast.
You know, it's not about just having a space for people to go
check in,do their
their zoom calls and to do email, right
It's all about intentionality.
(40:19):
It's all about having a purposeto go to the office.
It's a lot about thosethose three activities
that we talked about and activity based spaces.
Has that been, you know, wind in your sails?
Are people now seeing that sound isis another really important piece
of this concept, again of,creating a space
for people to dotheir best work,
which was not I don't know that
(40:40):
that was necessarily the bar thatpeople were striving to before.
You’ll know more about that than me,but I tend to agree with you.
I don't think people were striving,or had to strive for that.
Many still probably are not.
And, my guess is they're not doinga good job of getting people
back into the office
other than mandating it right.
(41:02):
And so Covid for us
definitely, shined a lenson this a little bit,
you know, companies that
it opened the door for us, with respect to well-being.
Right.
Suddenly this was something that
not just Google was focused on, right.
But all kinds of companiesthroughout the world.
And so a lot of our clientsare companies that,
(41:23):
are actually reducingtheir real estate holdings.
So they're economizingon their real estate while
increasing the qualityof what they have.
So, a recent example,we're now a part of what's,
the healthiest officebuilding in the world,
just rolled out,
I think they've rolled out now eight floors of 12 floors,
in London, you know, fully soundscaped.
(41:44):
They've got lots of cool techin the building, right.
You can,
and I should saythis is part of a consolidation.
They used to have a slightlysprawling campus outside of London.
Now they've consolidated.
It's a smaller footprint,but it's central.
It's, you know, where you'dwant to do the shopping
and where you mightgo to the gym.
They have all the amenitiesin the office,
(42:06):
from sound to space planning and technology tools.
They've got it all.
They're giving people real reasonsto come in to the workspace.
It works phenomenally well.
I'd say those tendto be our clients,
companies that are doing that.
Not everyone isdoing that.
Obviously.
I think to, part of my experience through Covid
given my experience with sound,
(42:26):
you know, the fact that wethink a lot about the sound
and we experience, a lot of end users,
struggling withsound and
having their experienceimprove with soundscaping
going into Covid.
Pretty quickly, everyone was onlytalking about collaboration.
If you're going to do focused work,you're going to do it at home now, right.
And now the new office,if people are going to come in
(42:47):
it's going to beabout collaboration.
And people tendnot to actually work that way.
Right.
Like we don't just come inand do one mode all day long.
I certainly don't.
And this has beenborne out
most of our clients to there's
one of the things that,
a lot of our clients are strugglingwith the most, actually,
is an inabilityto focus in the office.
(43:10):
And you see this evidenced bythe growth of companies, you know,
producing pods, sort ofphone booths for people
to go into and work.
You have a lot of clients who,
you know, our engagement with them started because,
oh my gosh, we're just
we have to spend like $20,000to put one of these pods in.
Maybe we should do somethingabout the sound environment, so
(43:31):
So there's a lot more collaboration happening,
in this world post-Covid.
But, people still need to be ableto do their focused work as well.
And this has beena driver for us.
Yeah.
Well, the other piece that I wouldimagine would be a tailwind
that Covid did,is it just increased the focus
on the internal environmentinside the building.
You know, specifically morelike I said about HVAC,
(43:52):
once they figured outCovid was an airborne disease,
but suddenly everyone is like,you know,
do you have enough ventilation?
You know, are you focusing on that?
Are you checking yourCO2 levels?
While everybody's tired and falling asleep at 3:00
because the building isis full of CO2.
And when and I'm curious,on your Asian clients,
you said that are pretty much back,to full time back in the office.
(44:14):
Everybody's going back.
Do they now just see this as,
a way to improve theinternal environment conditions
versus the London example that you just gave,
which is more of a,
of kind of an active promotionof a very special thing.
Is it seen now as kind ofthe next logical way
that you canincrease the,
(44:34):
the livability of aninternal environment,
even if you're not really motivatedby just trying to get people there
you’re just trying to make ita better space.
Yeah.
So with the Asian clients,
I think I meant andfailed to make a point,
which was, you know,
a lot of the offices I visited, they're simply requiring people to come in every day
[Evan] So it's really a difference of choice. [Jeff] That's what I mean.
So if it's required,why spend the extra money?
(44:56):
Unless you're really tryingto think about ways you can make it
a better experienceas opposed to making it a draw?
Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.
And yes, I think that's one ofthe reasons they're doing it.
I mean, there are other things toothat are that are sort of helping with this
The WELL building standard,for example
has had a pretty big impact,
something that a lot of people,a lot of our clients are pursuing,
(45:18):
either directly as a certificationor sort of as a, as a signpost.
You know, they'refollowing that,
standard to learn abouthow to make better, healthier buildings.
It is about making more functional spaces.
Also, I'm just freshfrom this recent trip to Asia.
One of our clientswas in Hong Kong.
And they've got,you know, beautiful offices.
(45:38):
Looks right out over,Victoria Harbor.
And they did a lot to,
create this space that's central,that's easy for people to get to
that provides all the tech tools that they need.
But that also really just gives them
a better experience of theworkspace, and I think it's,
you can look at it cynically in saying they're trying to extract more, you know
productive output from their people, which is true.
(45:59):
But they're doing that by,you know,
making peoplefeel better, right?
Improving their attentionalcapacity throughout the day.
Um, and as part of that,
you know, you come in, you look out,
you can see Victoria Harbor,
you can hear the sounds of Victoria Harbor when you come in.
You know, they've just createda better workspace
that works better for people.
And, and yes,some of them are more,
(46:21):
you know, motivatedby the clear ROI
that they're getting from people.
Others are more focusedon well-being.
At the end of the day,it's the same result.
That's great, Evan.
Well, we're running out of time.
I want to give you the last word.
For people that haven'tthought about this,
how should they think about it?How should they approach it?
Or is there some really nice,clear examples where you can
(46:43):
you can demonstrate that, you know,this has a really positive impact
on people's well-being,which then translates
into their productivity, retention,everything else about how
they should maybe be thinking about the soundscapes
in their built environments.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I guess the best,and this is a complete like,
you know, pitch, butbut I'd say anyone who's interested
(47:04):
who wants to experience it,they should just
come into a buildingand have a listen,
come into a buildingthat we've soundscaped,
they can experience it fromfor themselves,
ideally spend some timetrying to work there.
But, yeah, we're rolling out, a number of,
showcases that are specificallyexperience centers.
And then we alsohave a number of,
(47:25):
clients distributednow throughout the world,
where we can bring people in, they can experience this
and have a listen.
So I'd say, yeah, best
best method for someone who's
who's interested issimply get in touch
we’d love for them to experience Moodsonic
Our biggest footprint rightnow, is in North America
and then, immediatelyfollowed by Asia Pacific.
(47:46):
We have a lot throughout Asian countries,
including Australia as well.
So yeah, anyonewho's interested,
should just, get in touch
and we'll give them something to listen to.
Awesome.
Well Evan, it's a really cool story.
And, it's one of these great,
you know, things that maybe people don’t think about
as terms of top of consciousness,
about how it canreally impact people.
At the same time, we all know how powerful sound is.
(48:08):
We all know how powerful music is.
It can translate youto different places in time.
It can set your mood,it could change your mood.
It can do so much for us.
So it kind of seemsobvious in hindsight,
but maybe it wasn't so obvious.
Looking forward and now with thisfocus on wellbeing and creating
the environmentfor people to do their best work,
what an important,piece of the puzzle.
So thank you very much for sharing the story.
(48:30):
It's been my pleasure.
Thanks for helping me to share it.
I appreciate that.
My pleasure.
All right.
He's Evan, I'm Jeff,you're watching ‘Work 20XX’
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listeningon the podcast.
We'll see you next time. Take care.
Great.
Awesome. Well thank you, Jeff.
I really do appreciate it.
Thank you.
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