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Personalized Masking Spaces

Background noise, generated by telephone ringing and speech conversation, results in a source of annoyance for open-office workers and has a detrimental effect on their working conditions. Furthermore, when speech can be overheard by other persons, the speech privacy of that conversation could be compromised. That means that intelligible speech could affect not only concentration but acoustic comfort and confidentiality, as well. In this regard, sound masking has been proposed as a technological solution to reduce the intelligibility of speech by adding some ambient noise with a loudspeaker system, making undesirable conversations less audible. The use of natural sounds (e. g. wind, rain, or country sounds), or even music, allows to create a natural soundscape that may be more pleasant than broadband noises.

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