Business Offices have several types of spaces that would benefit from attention to acoustics, including:

• Open plan offices
  
• Meeting rooms
  
• Meeting rooms with teleconferencing

Open-Plan Offices

Open-plan offices are the exact opposite of concert halls. A concert hall is for enhancing soft sounds for concentrated listening at a distance. In an open-plan office, on the other hand, you don’t want to hear a pin drop; you want to be able to not hear your colleague on the phone. This is achieved by acres of acoustical tile and intentional background noise. The background noise can be the HVAC system, or it can be intentionally installed electronically generated pink noise.

Meeting Rooms

Meeting rooms are rooms for discussion and dialogue (including classrooms). Size and background noise should be the first priority for designing these spaces. The number of people may necessitate a certain size, but minimizing the size will almost always be acoustically beneficial. How much acoustical difficulty is encountered in an intimate living room? None.

There is more meeting than hanging acoustical tile. In particular, to optimize conversation among a large group of people, it is necessary to completely exclude background noise.