LEED & WELL for SOUND MASKING
LEED & WELL Building Standards advocate for sound masking
LEED certification
This standard implicitly encourages the use of sound masking technology in office spaces. How? By lowering the minimum sound insulation ratings required between adjacent rooms in order to achieve the sound transmission requirement within the acoustic performance credit, whenever a well-designed sound masking system is installed in the space aiming for LEED certification.
It’s the Green Building Certification Institute’s way of acknowledging a key scientific principle in architectural acoustics: how the acoustic privacy between two adjacent rooms depends as much on their background sound level as it does on the sound isolation performance of their partitions.
When the goal to ensure conversations in one room won’t be heard in another—the higher a room’s background sound level, the less soundproof the room next to it needs to be.
WELL Building Standard
The latest version of the WELL Building Standard, WELL v2, doesn’t just encourage the use of sound masking technology to ensure proper acoustic privacy in office spaces- it outright calls for it.
WELL v2 devotes an entire optimisation feature to increasing acoustic privacy within and between occupied spaces by uniformly elevating their ambient background sound level using an adjustable array of loudspeakers-a textbook definition of what sound masking systems are all about. WELL is also explicit about how ambient background sound provided by HVAC systems alone can’t be relied upon for ensuring proper, consistent acoustical privacy, given how even the best HVAC systems cycle and vary in sound output and uniformity over time.
LEED & WELL Building Standards advocate for sound masking
LEED certification
This standard implicitly encourages the use of sound masking technology in office spaces. How? By lowering the minimum sound insulation ratings required between adjacent rooms in order to achieve the sound transmission requirement within the acoustic performance credit, whenever a well-designed sound masking system is installed in the space aiming for LEED certification.
It’s the Green Building Certification Institute’s way of acknowledging a key scientific principle in architectural acoustics: how the acoustic privacy between two adjacent rooms depends as much on their background sound level as it does on the sound isolation performance of their partitions.
When the goal to ensure conversations in one room won’t be heard in another—the higher a room’s background sound level, the less soundproof the room next to it needs to be.
WELL Building Standard
The latest version of the WELL Building Standard, WELL v2, doesn’t just encourage the use of sound masking technology to ensure proper acoustic privacy in office spaces- it outright calls for it.
WELL v2 devotes an entire optimisation feature to increasing acoustic privacy within and between occupied spaces by uniformly elevating their ambient background sound level using an adjustable array of loudspeakers-a textbook definition of what sound masking systems are all about. WELL is also explicit about how ambient background sound provided by HVAC systems alone can’t be relied upon for ensuring proper, consistent acoustical privacy, given how even the best HVAC systems cycle and vary in sound output and uniformity over time.
Want to know more about Sound Masking?
Get in touch and speak with a member of the Sound Directions team to discuss your Sound Masking requirements.