
Is Your Business Too Noisy? - jackchristopher
http://juliantreasure.blogspot.com/2008/07/noise-costs-retail-millions.html
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anigbrowl
Great post. As a sound engineer and someone who does sound for film, I'm
blessed with good hearing and cursed with extreme sensitivity to noise. Most
people don't think about it, but it has an enormous impact on mood and
productivity, whether you operate a public place like a store or just have a
radio in the corner of the office. An ugly sound environment (eg 3 sets of
desktop speakers playing different TV feeds at low volume around an office) is
horribly stressful and causes my productivity to evaporate. If there's a voice
in the background (eg a TV or a podcast) I find it very hard to tune it out
while I'm supposed to be reading.

Conversely, adding some natural noise (such as a little water toy, if the
water is louder than the electric motor) can help smooth out the rough edges
of otherwise unpleasant noise. And fairly inexpensive things like hard disk
sleeves can significantly reduce the ambient noise in your office.

Don't get me started on sound in retail environments. I have fantasies about
calling in an airstrike on the local 'easy listening' station; and actively
seek to minimize my time in any store where it is played. By contrast, low-
volume classical music will cause me to slow down and linger. There are two
different 7-11 stores I regularly go into (I'm a big fan of their coffee)
which have their radios tuned to the 'lite rock' and 'classic fm' stations,
and you can likely guess which one I spend more at.

Safeway has a good strategy in this respect. They play generic pop, but it's
very quiet, and they make occasional shopping announcements (of the 'great
discounts on bread all this week' type), but only one at a time and so
infrequently that it feels informative rather than obnoxious. Also, in the
vegetable section they have a little gizmo that flickers the cabinet lights
and plays a quiet thunder sound every time the automatic mister goes off,
about once every 60 seconds. It's very unobtrusive. This was amusing the first
few times, but I freely admit I've internalized as a reminder to buy
vegetables every time I go there.

~~~
jackchristopher
He spoke at TED: <http://on.ted.com/48>

And you might like "Designer forget sound design":
[http://juliantreasure.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-has-
sonic-a...](http://juliantreasure.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-has-sonic-
architecture-gone.html)

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cpher
I'm glad other people feel this way too. My wife is hearing impaired and one
of our main criteria for grading restaurants is the noise level. We recently
walked into a new neighborhood restaurant with high expectations, and we
turned around and walked out before being seated because the noise level was
so high (hard surfaces and close tables everywhere). And don't get me started
on my office environment--checking voice mail over your speakerphone? Really?

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dstorrs
Interesting article; I suspect that that mapping from "brick/mortar -> sound"
to "online -> visual" also holds true.

