What does your office really sound like? If you had to recreate the ambience of your workplace, how realistic would it seem? Sound engineer Iwan Gabovitch has put together a pretty convincing 2 hour segment of office noises on “SoundLikeTube”. It’s a lengthy, looping clip that is designed for use in video or audio productions. Other suggested uses are:

• Playing it in the background when you need to pretend you’re at work
• Adding it to the ambient noise of your real office to make your business seem bigger
• Using it to feel less lonely at a work from home job

In fact, most of us tune out the noise in the office after a while (although it still creates stress at a subconscious level). Here are just a few of the sounds you might hear if you really start listening:

1. People talking (blah, blah, chatter, laugh, blah, blah)
2. Office printers running (whir, chug, chug—paper jam!)
3. Papers being shuffled (rustle, rustle, rustle)
4. Cell phones vibrating (that buzzing sound of a phone sitting on a desk is still audible with the ringer turned off)
5. Staplers (Whack! Breathless pause…whack!)
6. Keyboard and mouse (the click, tap, tap, tap, click never stops)
7. Music playing from the guy wearing headphones with the volume cranked up (either something you wish you could hear or something you’d like to block out.
8. Chip or snack containers—arguably one of the most annoying sounds in any office (crinkle, crinkle)
9. Air conditioning or heating (whoosh, whoosh, hum just at the edge of your hearing range)
10. File cabinet drawers opening and closing (scrape, thunk, scrape, thunk, someone please get the WD40!)

It’s a wonder anyone can work in an office with all that racket. If you’re ready to start cutting down on the distractions, OBEX can help. We can add height and additional sound reduction to your existing cubicle walls to limit office noise intrusion. For workstations without panels, consider our desktop mounted acoustic panels. Employees can choose to turn their desk into a cube and finally get enough peace and quiet to really concentrate. Click through to see our full range of cubicle panel extenders.