Acoustic Design and Sound Masking in Open-Plan Offices

Ask staff what frustrates them most about an open-plan office and noise usually tops the list—overheard calls, nearby conversations, the general hum of a busy floor that makes concentration difficult. It’s rarely the layout itself that gets blamed; it’s the sound.

Good acoustic design in office design treats this as a problem to solve deliberately, using a combination of absorption, zoning and, where appropriate, sound masking rather than hoping it resolves itself.

Hard floors, exposed ceilings and glass partitions create the industrial, light-filled look many workplaces want, but those same finishes reflect sound rather than absorbing it, letting speech and noise travel much further than intended.

The result is a floor plate where a single phone call near one desk can be clearly heard several rows away, undermining concentration for everyone in between.

Sound masking introduces a low, engineered background sound—tuned to the frequency range of human speech—that reduces how intelligible and distracting nearby conversation feels, without adding noise staff consciously notice.

It isn’t a substitute for good acoustic fundamentals. Masking works best layered on top of absorption and sensible zoning, not as a fix for a space that has neither.

The ceiling is usually the largest uninterrupted surface in an office, which makes it the single most effective place to introduce acoustic absorption—whether through suspended acoustic panels, baffles or treated exposed-ceiling finishes.

Choosing between an exposed or suspended ceiling early in design matters here, since each approach demands a different acoustic strategy to achieve a comparable result.

Positioning phone booths, meeting rooms and collaboration zones away from areas meant for focused, individual work removes a large share of avoidable noise before any acoustic treatment is specified at all.

This kind of concept design and spatial planning decision costs nothing extra to get right, yet it’s one of the most consequential acoustic decisions in the entire fitout.

Full-height partitions perform very differently to partial-height screens, and gaps above ceiling tiles or under raised floors are common, overlooked paths for sound to travel between rooms that otherwise look acoustically separated.

Material selection—soft furnishings, acoustic wall panels, carpet versus hard flooring—adds further absorption, and small specification choices here compound significantly across a full floor plate.

Acoustic strategy has to be resolved alongside mechanical services, lighting layouts and IT infrastructure, since ceiling voids and partition routes are shared by all of them at once.

Coordinating these trades from early design stages avoids the common outcome where an acoustic ceiling gets compromised by a services run added in afterwards.

Acoustic decisions are easy to lose during tendering, since they’re rarely visible in a render and often sit quietly behind a ceiling or wall. Detailed construction documentation is what keeps them specified rather than quietly dropped.

Ask to see how acoustic requirements are captured in documentation before committing to a fitout—vague or missing detail here is a reliable predictor of noise complaints later.

A well-designed acoustic strategy should be verifiable once a fitout is complete, not simply assumed to work because the right products were specified on paper.

Review completed office projects and, where possible, ask how staff have found the acoustic environment since moving in—that feedback tells you more than a specification sheet ever will.

ISA™ carries workplace fitouts through management systems certified to ISO 9001 for quality, extending to ISO 45001 for safety and ISO 14001 for environmental management—see the quality, safety and environmental policies for more detail.

That means the coordination behind an acoustic strategy is independently audited, not just a claim made during the pitch.

Soundproofing blocks noise from travelling between spaces. Sound masking instead adds a low, unobtrusive background sound that reduces how far speech carries and how distracting it feels, without sealing the workplace off.

Acoustics don’t show up in a render, so they’re easy to deprioritise against finishes and layout during design. The cost of that gets paid later, once staff are working in a space that looks good but sounds distracting.

Yes, but retrofitted treatment is usually more visually intrusive and less effective than acoustic decisions made during design, since it has to work around a ceiling, layout and services already in place.

It performs best alongside good absorption and layout decisions. Sound masking reduces the distraction of speech, but it can’t compensate on its own for a ceiling and floor plate with no acoustic treatment at all.

At concept design stage, alongside zoning and layout. Acoustic strategy shapes decisions about ceiling type, partition placement and material selection that are far more difficult to unwind once construction has started.

Noise is one of the most consistent complaints in open-plan workplaces, yet it’s also one of the most solvable, provided it’s treated as a design question rather than something staff are left to manage on their own.

Zoning, absorption and sound masking each play a different role, and it’s the combination—decided early, not bolted on later—that determines whether an open-plan office actually supports the people working in it.