Crickets and Desert Breezes

I have been blessed with a nice quiet office for massage therapy. My building has lots of mature trees in the yard, pleasant birdies and a very quiet accountant on the other side of my treatment room wall.

           

It has made me forget the days when people chattered right outside my room, clanged the pool gate or held aerobics classes next door.

            

Yup, I got spoiled.

So I have a new neighbor, a very nice and very smart chiropractor. He works fairly quietly, but in my office building, like many small office settings, the entire building shares a drop ceiling with ambient space above. Noise-conducting ambient space.

            

His office contractor put up some sound board on the window sill between out two rooms, and added some heft to the ceiling tiles. Yet there is still some pretty audible chatter that seems to float down from the ceiling now and then.

            

And there’s my eclectic schedule of interesting people. Joy of joys, last week one of my clients made a breakthrough with her neck pain. Her breakthrough involved yelling at the person who hit her car and progressed to telling off her father.

           

I hoped the chiropractor was not in his office. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the week. Uh-huh.

            

Well, this is the age of research. About 10 years ago was the last time I dealt with ambient noise problems in the massage room. We used a little fountain that provided enough trickle noise to mask little annoying noises. For very sensitive clients, I added a little sound machine that had birdsongs, crickets or ocean waves.

We were thinking of moving from our poolside room into the hotel. Then I was looking at ways to reduce the sound of giant washing machines coming through the floor from the hotel’s laundry. These machines would start slow, and build up a good whine like jet engines.

            

The hotel’s manager suggested I look at some sound solutions. I found some folks who were selling a drywall embedded with a liquid membrane to stop sound. They also had an acoustic caulk, outlet putty and fabric covers for the ceilings. For about the price of the space shuttle. One way.

            

We stayed in our poolside building, where the noise amounted to racquets hitting tennis balls, the occasional splash and crickets or trickling water.

            

Sound science has changed. Now companies need people to focus and concentrate on their work in a quiet environment. No more noisy cubicles that allow the boss an easy way to watch the drones. I found several companies providing fabric-covered walls, wall sculptures, special tiles and more. One even has acoustical paint! A lot of these solutions required construction, so I nixed them off the list.

Then I found a sub-specialty called “speech privacy.” This, it turns out, is exactly what I needed. A lot of medical care these days is provided in small exam rooms in big clinics. People can hear people through the walls, and even though they may not be able to hear everything, ambient voices can keep people from telling the doctor what is going on. Add to that HIPAA, the patient privacy act, requires people not be exposed to situations where they might be overheard.

On the advice of one of these sound companies, I’m investing in a $50 “white” noise machine. No more crickets.