Sound of Colleagues | Hacker News Reader

Sound of Colleagues

soundofcolleagues.com

67 pointsherbertl48 comments

I had a colleague who used to sit across me. Really swell guy, but literally every sip of coffee he took from his mug ended with a smacking sound followed by a contented exhalation. Boy, did he love his coffee! Believe me, I do not have misophonia but that nearly drove me insane.

Needs two dozen slightly desynchronised 'upcoming meeting' alerts playing unmuted.

The modern day call to prayer.

This[1] was submitted a while back. Might be just what you need.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29561296

Every time I stumble upon a project like this one, I'm impressed that people would miss the sound of open space. I can understand that people have some reasons to prefer going to the office instead of WFH but, missing the sound of it ?

I'm this guy. I can't sit in a too quiet space and get anything done, I'll go stir crazy. I usually work out of coffee shops or on my balcony where I can hear kids playing in the yard, some traffic, someone listening to radio a bit further away.. random noise. Without it, after maybe 20-30 minutes I get antsy and need to get out.

I could do without all the bird noises though, the sea gulls here are incredibly annoying.

> I can't sit in a too quiet space

Music doesn't help? Everyone at our office has headphones on with music exactly to stop hearing distracting background noise.

Nothing really changes for me when I go remote - same music.

Same for me. I mean for really difficult and focussed work I prefer a very quiet place but for rather standard work an open space is perfect, keeps me from falling asleep

All it takes is opening a window really.

Radios and kids playing are the worst noises. Idk how you do it. I like the sounds of birds lol.

I appreciate the toggle on volume, but it desperately needs some kind of random silence insertion threshold as well, to space out the distance more randomly. Like what if I don't mind hearing a telephone, but it doesn't need to be every 30 seconds? I like this project, dont' get me wrong. I just think each of these components also needs a way to space out the time between cars driving by etc., while presently there is only a volume slider.

Needs someone coming up to you and asking if you have a minute every 30 seconds

That's the office dog.

... or the person tapping you on your shoulder to inform you that you're wearing headphones, your IM is on do-not-disturb and you're not sitting in your usual desk (but still responding to email).

Also, the sound of someone in the next cubicle eating something crispy with their mouth open.

THIS ^^^ !!!!!

If only the reverse existed. A lightweight piece of software you can play through your speakers to disappear all that noise from a real office environment.

I guess the industrial grade hearing protector industry would take a major hit though.

Office designers on the European continent have come up with an ingenious invention for this: Individual offices!

Site managers in North America rarely want to hear this, since it's more expensive and supposedly prevents close collaboration and encourages slackers, but that's just a bunch of BS. It's absolutely fantastic to just be able to close your door and have peace and quiet if you need to get into flow. Much better than being forced to wear headphones all day, for noise-cancellation or forced-music-listening instead.

We have a big problem with open plan offices in Europe as well. Individual offices are far rarer than open plan.

We have special closed cubicles which aren't assigned to anyone on every floor (I don't know their name in English) which can be booked if you want isolation but they're in such demand that they're often unavailable.

> Office designers on the European continent have come up with an ingenious invention for this: Individual offices!

Where did you get this idea from?

At best, companies have team rooms that hosts 5-8 people but not individual offices.

I work in Europe at a nice company with nice offices. It's beautiful.

Most of the time we all have our doors wide open, it's glass doors, mostly glass walls, very bright, very modern. Everybody is welcome to stop by at any time when the door is open. Door closed means "please don't disturb unless it's an emergency". People close doors to have longer discussions, to have confidential discussions, or to have peace and quiet.

The doors basically serve the same purpose as headsets. They just make more sense and are more ... human.

Yes, some offices house more than one person. Typically 2, some have 3. But the employees in this situation are quite content with this and could request single offices at any time.

I don't know how noisy the office you are referring to is, but I found that using noise cancelation headphones (bose,sony,jabra) and having Grey Noise ( https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/greyNoiseGenerator.php ) does produce good results while not being distracting.

I have a Bose Quitcomfort 35 set that I use for travelling. I can't stand the "pressure" in ear feel for a long time when the noise cancellation in turned on.

Besides, while they are good in cancelling e.g. aircraft engine noise, the active part does nothing to prevent e.g. human voices, and even high end headsets are far inferiour to dirt cheap industrial hearing protection where passive isolation is concerned.

I don't want to have to drown out ofice noise by blasting my ears with noise. I find having to wear any head/ear device a nuisance, and I tried a lot (fwiw cheap on ear Sound Blaster Jam V2's were unexpectedly comfortable and also great sounding to boot).

I have tankfully worked from home for the most part of the last decade (no, what was called WFH during the Covid lockdowns is not the same at all).

I used the paid subscription of brain.fm and was very happy with it (when I has in the office, that is). Just be warned, it's eating up lots of bandwidth and data plan.

https://www.brain.fm/

I'm currently listening to brain.fm! I'm not sure how well it actually influences your brain to concentrate, but I find it's at least a decent semi-conscious reminder to stay focused. And it does also help drown out other noises.

You mean white noise

That's just switching from one kind of noise to another.

Sound/speech masking is incredibly effective. We had a trial system in part of our old office and in the area covered by the system, it felt natural but when you knew to listen for the reduction in perceived annoyance/disturbance, it was much lower.

It’s not white noise, though: https://cambridgesound.com/learn/sound-masking-101/

(The trial was winter of 2019, then something happened in spring 2020 to keep us from going forward…)

no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

Or you'd just loop the menu sound from The Stanley Parable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ8M6ElBk5s

This page is proof everyone has different needs. I sometimes struggle to read a single sentence with a single conversation going on in the background.

One of the many things I don't miss at all from office work.

also, from a previous post: https://soundsofthepub.com

Imagine the antisoundofcolleagues.com, an active listening noise cancelling website!

That’s just noise cancelling headphones. But, come to think of it, that should be a slider on this site, to turn down all the other sounds…

If only. Noise cancelling headphones can block out droning sounds but are limited to their passive isolation when it comes to voices, especially higher pitched ones. A few years ago I was positioned close to a woman who was always on the phone talking loudly with vendors and there was nothing I could do aside from risking hearing damage to make that disappear. And now, while it's better since I'm not near her anymore, it's still tough when multiple conversations are going on around me all at once.

I don't get this. At literally all the places I've worked were filled with people trying to shut this kind of noise out with headphones...and now we have an app that recreates this horrible noise? Why?

Needs more irritatingly off-rhythm tapping of pens on desk and feet on floor.

Definitely needs That One Guy who tells "jokes" all day long, in between telling us about his latest trailer/dog/bear weekend escapade. Say, did I ever tell you about ...

I prefer the background sound of rain, there are a lot of long rain videos on youtube and I am very grateful to the people who post them.

I wish it would save your slider levels, e.g. in the URL, so you can bookmark your favourites.

I wonder if anyone has proper research on wether this makes you more productive or not.

Thanks, I hadn't realised until now that apparently I have office PTSD...

Isn’t “Room tone” really the sound of the HVAC?

Doesn’t seem to work on iOS?

I am so going to use it

go dystopia

Dystopian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com