Today, the cacophony of daily life has reached almost unbearable levels, which explains the ubiquity of noise-canceling headphones. Yet, in our culture of collective digital overshare, it’s not uncommon to hear strangers blasting music on the subway or screaming on a video call in a restaurant. Our need to tune things out feels more like an act of survival than a simple desire to finish the last 30 minutes of that podcast.
Amar Bose, founder of the audio company that bears his name, first conceived of noise cancellation on a flight from Zurich to Boston. It was 1978, and although air travel was then a more dignified affair, the engines were much louder. Members of the U.S. Air Force could relate, and Bose spent nearly a decade producing prototypes that were evaluated by the military pilots during flight tests.
In 2000, more than two decades after Bose’s original idea, the company introduced its now-iconic QuietComfort noise-canceling headphones to the consumer market. It’s a technically complex proposition to measure a sound wave, then immediately create equal and opposite waveforms in order to effectively blunt offending noise—and to do it in a smart, non-clunky way (that doesn’t make listeners look like conspiracy theorists listening for scoops on Area 51) definitely takes time.
Now, a new breed of cool, colorful offerings has finally given the noise-canceling category a well-deserved double take. At this year’s edition of the contract design show NeoCon, a number of companies showcased products engineered to trap noise. “The need for peace and quiet has become evident from both a wellness and productivity perspective,” says Byron Morton, NeoCon’s vice president of leasing. “Today, these categories have grown to include phone booths, privacy pods and pop-up meeting rooms, manufactured by companies large and small.”
The notion of sound-blocking wall panels is not new, but the modern, adaptable configurations now available as dividers, wallcoverings and even light fixtures has taken the category to the next level. When a pendant light can help mitigate echoes and illuminate a space, or an acoustically engineered pouf can absorb sound while providing extra seating and remaining lightweight enough to spirit away, the cumbersome and occasionally style-restrictive nature of these products is replaced by very real design possibilities.
But how do you sort through all of the noise to know if a product is the right solution for you? A material’s ability to absorb sound is measured by the Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC). In the simplest terms, a rating of 0 means all sound is reflected; an NRC of 1.0 theoretically means all sound is absorbed. Concrete, for example, registers at 0.3, which explains why we find ourselves shouting in crowded restaurants with industrial-chic interiors. A shag carpet might have an NRC of 0.25, meaning that it absorbs 25 percent of all sound (but at perhaps too great a style sacrifice).