Office noises, the '90s mix

When Calm Office was released in March 2020, it became a huge hit, instantly. What was meant as a joke - who misses office noises, really? - actually found a serious use during lockdowns. It helped people who were missing the sound of their colleagues to recover an environment favorable for working in. Media gave Calm Office a wonderful coverage. It all started with a report on CBS news, and then many other news outlets followed, including a live interview on BBC World! I was a little embarrassed though: devoting so much effort to traveling the world to record quiet nature ambiences, and being praised for noisy office sounds. Ouch!

That all happened because the pandemic changed our habits and our relationship to noise. When people are forced to work from home, it suddenly makes sense to look for a sound that mimics the sound of their habitual working environment, a sound that their brain has associated with productivity. When such association happens, the subconscious would not even hear it as nuisance anymore, or not even hear it at all! Plus, office sounds turned out to be very good at blocking other noises, and those from your home in particular, like your kids watching television in the room next door for example. So, I discovered - beyond the Calm Office joke - there was a real serious application for it: creating a genuinely quietening environment for people used to working in noisy offices.

Two years have passed. Since, users have requested an office that's noisier than Calm Office. There were also requests for a vintage set of noises, as those sounds we hated then have since gained a certain charm as they now remind us of the past. Vintage Office recreates the sounds of an office that could have existed in the nineties, when floppy disks where still a thing, and inkjet printers were state of the art, certainly in comparison with the dot matrix printers that were still in use then. Computers had a memory of 4MB - about the size of a single mp3 file... and browsers would certainly not be able to run a site like myNoise, but were restricted to display textual contents.

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