Evan Benway: Dynamic Sound, Positive Well-Being | Work 20XX Ep30

English Transcript
Evan Benway: Dynamic Sound, Positive Well-Being | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep30
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Cold Open:
You ready? Evan, you ready?
Got your water, so everything's good?
Let's go. Yeah.
All right. In three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home studio for another episode of Work 20XX. And we’re going in kind of a different direction today, which I'm pretty excited about. You know, there's a lot of talk about well-being, and there's a lot of talk about thinking of people as humans and not as resources. And how can you create an environment for people to do their best work, which is a very different kind of standard for what people are trying to do now? And so I'm excited to have somebody who's really involved with something like setting the mood, and what sets the mood more than sound and music. So we're excited to have joining us from across the pond from Austria this morning. He's Evan Benway, the founder and CEO of Moodsonic. Evan, great to see you today.

Evan Benway:
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Moodsonic, give us just kind of a quick 101 to set the table so people know what we're talking about.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. So Moodsonic is all about using the power of sound for good. So we are a technology company. We focus on creating generative sound. So methods of creating sound in real time, that can change, that can respond, that can be interacted with, with a specific focus on the built environment. So we do a lot of work in commercial offices. This is sort of the first area that we went into to really learn user problems and create better sonic experiences. So we do a lot of work in offices. We're doing more and more work now in healthcare and hospital environments, helping people to heal, and then in educational spaces as well, helping people to learn. So it's all about adding sound for positive benefit. Whereas historically, sound's been sort of more of a problem, more of a negative thing, we're bringing about some positives with it.

Jeff Frick:
I love it. So, you know, getting ready for this, doing some research. You know, you've noted in a number of your other episodes that sound has historically been rated as the biggest problem in office environments. The biggest complaint, whether it's too loud, too frequent, you know, I got a noisy neighbor problem. So it's a really interesting approach to try to flip sound from being a negative to actually being a positive. So how did you kind of start to think about that, and how do you start to think about active control of sound to the positive versus this pesky distraction that keeps getting in the way of me trying to get my work done?

Evan Benway:
Yeah. Gosh. Well, I guess for me, it really starts as a musician and the child of musicians. So I grew up with a lot of sound around me, a lot of really good sound, beautiful sound, evocative sound. And I know we share that, right. And so, you know, anyone who's really experienced the joy of music knows why this can be such a great medium. Sound can be emotive, it can affect us physiologically. Give you goosebumps in a good way. The unfortunate state of affairs in commercial offices and most of the built environment has just been such a negative. As you say, it's the top thing that people complain about. And it's gotten to the point in offices where Leesman, they've done one of the larger studies I've seen looking at office workers globally, and have identified sound as the single biggest thing standing in the way of people coming back into the offices today. So it was just astounding to me when I got into this, that sound was just such a problem. And knowing from my background in music that it has positive potential for us, that's really where it all started for me.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. So there's lots of different types of sounds, and one of the themes that we see, kind of more generically in sensory support in offices is this concept of biophilic, which I learned from Ryan Anderson at MillerKnoll, which is the concept of bringing the outside in, whether that's plants and, and now you've got sound as part of it. So when I think of sound in the biophilic context, I think of, you know, bird sounds or a bubbling creek or whatever, and then you've got kind of music. And then you have, you know, maybe ambient sound that you're less conscious of. So when you think of kind of the whole sound spectrum, how do you approach it? Because you've really got a big potential universe of sounds to play with.

Evan Benway:
Yeah, yeah. So we do—there's a lot that you can use to create with—what we are. If you think about the environments that I described where we are operating, offices or take a hospital environment, but if we look at the office first, which is where we went first, you've got a relatively big space shared by several people, and something like music then can really easily become a problem of its own. I think you and I might agree on musical choices, I don't know, but then I might play, like, some esoteric jazz music. I happen to like that stuff. It's going to be really disruptive to you, right? So music's very powerful, emotive in the way I described, but is very subjective. And so it's difficult to use music in a shared environment like an office. Even in retail environments where music is used, it's widely disliked. So you can't really get away with music in offices. You know, some startups will do it, but eventually, once they grow beyond a few people, it doesn't really work. That's one of the reasons we draw so heavily on biophilia, not dogmatically or exclusively, but we use these sounds of nature because you can design for diverse groups of people, sharing a space, doing different things. So in an office, we often have someone who's really extroverted, who sonically, you know, they're going to benefit from some energy from things like the birdsong that you were describing. While they might really like that, and then we may have someone who's really introverted or who's just trying to do some focused work at that moment and would find that type of sound to be distracting. So biophilia generally, it gives us a nice palette of options to work with that. Thanks to our evolutionary biology. You know, it applies generally well to all of us. And then gives us some tools as well to vary it, to create nuance, and different types of sonic environments for different things.

Jeff Frick:
One of the things I found interesting is your statement about humans' perception to identify loops. And I thought the funniest part was you said you even did some experiments where you had a week-long, a single track, a week long. No repeating within that week. But if you played that over a period of time, you know, people would very quickly start to just naturally get bored of the loop. Recognize the loop, know that it's 8:30 on a Thursday. It's going to be, you know, ABBA, dance with me. When you think of kind of the conscious perception of the sound versus the unconscious perception of the sound, where it could be a potential distraction versus is there in support of these activities? How do you think of kind of consciousness in terms of should people hear the sound? Should they not hear the sound? Is it, do they hear it and then it fades into the background? If they get into a, you know, kind of a flow state, how do you think about the degree of consciousness when people are in this environment?

Evan Benway:
Yeah, great questions. Yeah. So people will identify loops. I don't want to overstate that scenario. It wasn't everyone in that office that identified the loops, but there were a few people who did, and those people were particularly sensitive to sound, and it really was a problem for them. So, you know, humans, we’re amazing at recognizing patterns even when they're not there. Right? We looked up at the stars and we saw all kinds of stories being told to us. Right. And so, those same principles apply to sound. We don't want to create loops. We don't want to create something that's going to become a distraction or an annoyance to anyone. So, yeah, it's a generally it's a really good principle to make sure that you're using generative sound that's evolving, that's changing. Now, yeah, there's this huge diversity in how people respond to sensory stimuli. Some people will want to hear something that's more active, that's more dynamic. We'll find even that that can benefit them doing cognitively demanding tasks like a bit of a positive distraction. Whereas for someone else who's really, you know, trying to do deep focused work, sort of like your stereotypical introvert or someone who's on the autistic spectrum, you know, someone who's hypersensitive, will not find that distraction to be positive. So there's quite a lot of variation within a workspace, you know, where we do a lot, where we try to, you know, create a soundscape that's going to work well for this diverse group of people. That can be a bit limiting. But then also, some of the things that we do. So we're, we use concepts like zoning. So, you know, you step into a particular area of a building and you can have a type of soundscape that's more stimulating, that's brighter, that's more energetic. And then if that's not the right fit fFor the type of work that you're doing or the type of personality you have, you've got some other options that you can go to in different areas. Those are some of the ways that we do that today. Increasingly though, as we deploy more and more generative sound and as it becomes more and more realistic to do truly real-time generative sound of these types of nature soundscapes that we're using, you can introduce a lot more ability to really personalize things. So we, we do a lot of research in trying to understand, you know, what's your sonic personality? You know, what's your sono type, as we call it? So as we increasingly know, all right, we've got these people in the building, they've got this mix of sensory sensitivities, and it's this today, then we can create a soundscape that's better for that, for those people.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. And just so people know, who haven’t done the homework. So you create, you have a generative AI system where you're creating fresh new sounds that have never been created. Obviously, you're pulling them from some track, but the whole idea is you're generating it dynamically based on the demands of the condition at that moment in time. It's not just playing tapes or playing CDs or, you know, playing MP3 files. You're actually generating new sounds based on the dynamics of the situation.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. That's right. So we generate and it's not random generation. You know, we introduce randomness sort of within bounds. Typically our user is not a sound engineer. It's someone who may be a real estate manager or an administrative user. And they want to know something relatively simple, right? I want to know this is going to help me relax, let's say, this is going to help, you know, with sensations of pain, maybe in a hospital, or this is going to be good for a collaborative ideation session. That tends to be what the user wants out of this. And so we use the concept of a theme whereby a user can select the theme that's going to do one of those things. And then our generative engine is doing what you described. So it's composing the soundscape in real time based on the logic that we've designed for that type of activity. Yeah. Truly real-time generation of sound too is something we're working a lot on that we're very interested in. The truly real-time generation of that is, we're not rolling that out in offices or anything like that today. Sort of the cost of a hallucination. If you think of like, you know, what ChatGPT can get wrong in an audio system in a ten-story building, would be really painful for us. So, you know, we don't do that yet, but that's, it's definitely coming as well.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. So, you know, challenges are opportunities and it seems to and you're addressing them. But I also want to call them out specifically that you've got kind of this [3x3x3] three by three by three, you know, super matrix. You've got kind of variability in people in terms of their sensitivity to sound. What types of sounds that they like. You have kind of variability in activity, even within those people, you know, what are they doing at that moment in time? And then you have kind of variability in space with different types of spaces that have different characteristics. And all those things could be changing all the time. So it's a great opportunity to think about you guys can adjust, but how do you, how do you kind of bucket it or is zones really the solution? Because it's interesting. Ryan Anderson, also from MillerKnoll has a great report years ago that said, you know, what are the three things best done not at home, better done at an office or a third party location. And one was collaboration, which everybody always talks about, you know, can we get together and collaborate on a project? Second was just pure socialization, just really trust building and relationship building and being together and having projects with that objective. And then the third is heads down work, because a lot of people maybe have busy houses or small houses or kids or whatever. So, you know, they need a place to go do, heads down work. So those are all three really different activities, all taking place in offices with very different, I would imagine, requirements in terms of how you support those types of activities.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You're right. I would say that all of that applies to visual design as well. Right. So just as with an office, it's true, you can't predict exactly what activity people are going to do in a given space at a given time. But we have spaces in offices that tend to suit focused work well. We have spaces in offices that tend to be designed around collaboration. And there's been a lot of change in how all of those things are designed in the past few years, obviously. And so that same thing applies to sound. And so I think, you can think about creating spaces that are more or less active, dynamic, energetic, with sound. And that's part of what we do. But also, yeah, these things change all the time. Gosh, it's very difficult for us, for example, to predict when it's going to be loud or quiet in an office or when it's going to be, stimulating for someone who might be hypersensitive to sound like, someone who might be classified as neurodiverse. We do a lot of long-term measurement of the sound fields. So we put sensors in place, typically we're measuring, you know, where is it loud? Where is it quiet? Where is it stimulating? Where is it active? And we use those as well to adjust the soundscape. Because you're right, you can't really predict that stuff very well. In some parts of the world you can. You know, in much of the Western world right now we can say Monday and Friday it's going to be relatively quiet. But I'm just back from a trip to, to Asia, where I was in a number of companies, countries where that is not the case. In an office that’s packed on a Monday and on a Friday. But the sound levels are not constant. It really changes. So the yeah, the soundscape, any sound that you're adding to the space really needs to know the context into which you're adding that sound.

Jeff Frick:
So are you actively listening as well, so you can make adjustments based on the volume or the activity in a particular room?

Evan Benway:
Yes and no. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, we use—we're quite different from some companies that, you know, listen and send audio places. So just, you know, without getting too techie, the way our system works, we use edge processing. So we don't send audio anywhere. Devices don't capture audio. They capture metadata. So things like, you know, is it loud? Is it quiet? Do we have energy in particular frequencies? And we do that because we want it to be useful. We want to create better soundscaping. We also want to inform our clients. So someone may want to come in on a quiet day and find a quiet place to work, and we can provide that information or actually, increasingly people want to come in to collaborate, as you're describing, and we can help them find that. We don't need to record conversations. We don't need to identify speech, any of that stuff. So we've made a decision as a company, we explicitly don't do that kind of stuff. We use edge analysis, just brokering with metadata. That's what we use to inform our system. So does that answer your question?

Jeff Frick:
And then adjust accordingly. So you mentioned visual design, and you talk a lot about using sound in a design context, right, to create these better environments. And some of the stuff I was listening to talked about the interplay between lots of design elements, not only the sound but also the visual, and that we tend to over-index on visual just because it's probably our primary sense for most people, and we just kind of think that way. But then there's all kinds of issues of too much stimulation and conflict, and. I wonder if you can share kind of how sound fits within the context of all of the emotional connectors or sensory inputs to help create a better environment for folks in these well-designed spaces.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, we don't perceive any of these senses on their own in isolation. So while we are very focused on sound as a company, one's experience of a soundscape can be impacted by what they see, by the temperature in the room. Right. So we experience everything in multiple senses at the same time. There's lots of research that's looked into this, an example that sometimes helps people relate to this is if you've ever done, like, dining in the dark, you go to a restaurant, they turn off the visual sense, right? And it really can enhance your sense of taste. And in fact, sound too has been used to do that, you know, causing people to perceive that a meal is saltier by adding some ocean waves. So there's a lot of interplay between our senses. Sound in particular is different in some ways, and I think it's related to why it's such a problem. Our sense of hearing really is an alarm system. This is, you know, one of its primary functions. So sound is designed to immediately, you know, trigger a fight or flight response. Even in the middle of the night when you're sleeping, right. We've all experienced this, someone honks a car horn or, you know, if you're traveling and then the air conditioning in the hotel flips on, like those changes. The dynamics really catch our attention. So those are things to look out for. These are opportunities for a soundscape, then to reduce some of the dynamics. We're also very sensitive to speech. Great evolutionary advantage in that if you can make sense of what someone else is saying, maybe even at a whisper, which you can, like you can do without, like most of the vowel sounds in my speech, actually. And you can still make out what I'm saying. I don't know if you know that, if you, it doesn't translate very well over a video call. But things like fricatives, sibilance. So the ‘f’s and ‘s’s, those types of really high-frequency sounds like that's what allows us to just whisper and be understood by someone else. Great as an alarm system, right? As this aid for communication in more primitive environments. Now you bring people into the office with that type of thing, right? And we're, we shouldn't be surprised that it's stressful for people, and that we're easily distracted by speech. So when people are complaining that noise is the top problem with offices it’s actually specifically the sound of other people talking. Right? That's grabbing our attention, interrupting our focus, even for people who want to collaborate. Because I know this is an increasing focus today for workplace design, a really quiet background environment is sort of anti-collaborative. A lot of people come into an office now and there's maybe less of a babble than there would have been pre-COVID because there are fewer people there. And try collaborating in that room, right, when everyone else can hear everything that you're saying. A lot of people find that to be a real problem and a hindrance to collaboration. So these are all great ways in which you can use, sound in that environment to, to help.

Jeff Frick:
It's funny you talk in some of your episodes about, sound in the past was just treated as a problem. And the solution was to mask it as much as you can. And but you also—there's some talk about these things. Was it ‘anechoic’—I'll probably mispronounce it ‘anechoic chambers’, which is places with absolute no sound. And we actually do need sound. And it's funny when people you say go in these chambers, I think the world record that you could even sit in one of these things, like less than an hour or an hour and a half, whatever, you know, it's like torture it’s like isolation it's like, you know, the worst thing you can do to somebody. So sound is actually more important, even at an ambient level, than maybe we give it credit for and no sound is not the solution, right?

Evan Benway:
Agreed. Yeah. I mean, you say torture, right. In our country of origin, you know, white noise, just broad spectrum noise, right, has been used, all throughout history to extract information from people. Right. You can torture people with noise. Unfortunately, our country of origin also has loud buildings with a lot of noise in them. It’s a bit of a problem for us to work on. I live in, as you mentioned at the beginning of the call, I live in Austria, in a part of Europe where buildings tend to be very quiet. So they don't have that noise problem, which is really good, but they are sort of getting towards the anechoic chamber. And anyone who's worked in like a German or a Finnish or, you know, your stereotypical Japanese office, like those really quiet background levels are also, pretty unnerving for people and certainly not, not good for a collaborative environment. Right?

Jeff Frick:
So you also work in hospitals and I'm just curious, hospitals have a completely different set of objectives in terms of what you're trying to accomplish with the people that are in the rooms, patients and doctors and nurses. And you've talked on some of the other episodes. I wonder if you could share, you know, some of the real physical benefits that this type of, I don't want to say therapy—may be therapy, but, you know, creating these environments actually has on people's physical, attributes, everything from breathing to heart rate, all kinds of positive benefits when this is done well.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. So, in hospital environments, we know that sound is really very powerful. That, again, sadly, you know, it's a big complaint. It interferes with sleep quality. Right. It really can negatively impact patient recovery time. But part of the work that we've been involved in as well shows that, sound when it's done right. And a lot of biophilic sounds in particular, you see major physiological improvements. So you'll see heart rate slowing, respiration slowing, sort of returning to healthier levels, decreases in stress. Patients in recovery settings will feel less pain, make fewer requests for pain medication, and recover faster from routine surgeries. So it's really powerful for the patient. Also, for me personally, one of the most overlooked areas is really that waiting room, not even just for the patient experience, but for the family member or someone who's waiting. I mean, I—we all have this experience. I recently had the experience of being in a hospital, in a psychiatric hospital waiting room, waiting to see a loved one. And oh my gosh, the sounds that you hear there, anything but, what they should be right to help everyone through that experience. So from the patient experience to physiologically improving, their, their stay in that hospital, getting them out faster with less pain medication, there's very clear sort of return on investment on that stuff for the hospital through to the patient experience too, where we can create environments that are more private, where things are not overheard, that shouldn't be overheard. And where people aren't going in to visit a loved one or experience a surgery, more anxious than they should be. These are all really opportunities for using sound.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's great. And what an opportunity to be able to take those learnings, you know, and incorporate into that to the office setting or, or school setting. I'm curious, you do a lot of stuff in school settings as well. Is there anything special about the school environment that's different than hospitals, that’s different than an office that you guys are seeing?

Evan Benway:
Yeah. And we don't do as much in schools. I'd say it's relatively new for us. You know, we're actually only a couple of years old as a company. And we went first into offices and then we've been doing more in hospitals. We've done some stuff in some schools, some universities. I mean, the thing that's the most different, I would say is, you know, you do a lot of work in offices. You run into just a certain amount of cynicism, right? People coming into the office and, you know. Yes, noise is the number one complaint, but oh my gosh, people complain about everything in their office environment. We were just working with a real leader in real estate, from a large pharmaceutical company, and she runs the Asia Pacific region, an extremely successful, really visionary real estate leader. And they rolled out this beautiful new suite of offices, you know, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai. And it included a lot of visual biophilia, a lot of plants. And the first comments that they got from everyone, it wasn't, you know, ‘Wow, what a great new office!’ Oh my gosh. These plants, you know, they bring about these physiological benefits that we know they do. No. The complaints were worries that the plants were going to cause more bugs inside. Right. So like in offices, you get cynicism, you get complaints, you know, people who doubt their own, you know, colleagues. You don't have any of that in schools. You know, we've done some stuff in elementary schools. And there it's more, you know, the kids, they want to get way more involved with, our stuff, with our technology. They want to be able to hack it. They want to play with it. We've had kids in schools using soundscapes for meditations. We've done stuff to where we get a lot more, sort of experiential. So we, we did a project with the school in Australia, doing sounds that are, that are local, to that school that are based on local nature, that help the kids to identify sounds and identify birds and things like that. So I'd say generally that's probably the biggest difference is just, you know, the, the different brain of the child compared to the adult in the office.

Jeff Frick:
Well, you're at this really interesting intersection between kind of emotional well-being and physical well-being and well-being, as I said in the intro, is a really important topic these days. Psychological safety, you know, basically creating a comfortable environment for people to take risk because that's how innovation happens and that's how you move the company along. But it is really interesting because it is kind of this emotional touch base into the physical that then both are supportive of people's productivity.

Evan Benway:
I agree. Yeah, I agree completely. Yeah, I agree completely. Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Very, very cool. One of the results of open floor plans, which were supposed to be so collaborative back into the office, is they're the noisy spaces and people are talking on the phone and I'd have no privacy. And so everyone's got headphones on. So you've got this kind of interesting dichotomy where everyone was supposed to be collaborating in an open space, and now it's just turned into everyone is isolated in their own little headphone world. How do you guys see the world of the headphones and kind of personal people trying to get into their own flow state with or whatever they're doing inside their, their headphones? And do you guys integrate into that? Is there a channel that I can tap into? And maybe even almost like a radio station where I'm like, all right, I'm shifting into head down space. I can't go to another space. I only have my silly little, little space that they give me. Have you started to give kind of individual choice outside of the parameters within the, within the particular room?

Evan Benway:
Yeah. So, our focus really is primarily on the built environment, the shared space, that shared audio space, because it's such a hard problem to solve. And that's where we’re—that's our niche that we're focused on. I tend to think that when it comes to, you know, you finding something to listen to on headphones at a given moment, that problem is solved. I'm pretty sure, like, I don't know specifically, Jeff, what you're going to listen to at that moment, but you'll find it. I'll find it. You know, there's—we've got lots of options when it comes to the individual. And so I consider that problem generally to be pretty well solved. You know, we could debate the details of it. People will tend to go to music. And it's true, research will show that any kind of music is going to be detrimental to cognitive performance. You know, music with lyrics worst of all. That said, for some people, if it's motivational, if it helps them to get their job done at all, right, like some people need something just to, to be motivated enough to do work, then I think it’s fine. I think the problem is more what you initially described. You've got an office full of people. We've now created an office that's more about collaboration than it was a few years ago. Now everyone's coming in and wearing headphones. That's a big problem. I used to work, actually. And in fact, this all started for me when I was working at, at the time, the world's largest headphone and headset manufacturer. And so I know this problem quite well. When we went into one of the, you know, tech, company, mega campuses and beautiful new campuses, designed specifically for collaboration. And that was the problem statement, sort of. Look what you've done. Everyone is coming in, all of our engineers who are supposed to be collaborating, they're, you know, using these headphones to say, do not disturb me. And it's mentally not collaborative. And so, yeah, I think we need to address the, the sound in the built environment. That's what we want to do. And then hopefully people using headphones, you know it's—it can, it can add to that. But it's not a requirement just to be able to, to function in the office.

Jeff Frick:
Do your customers track that? Are they tracking or kind of paying attention to the use of, of headphones as a, you know, kind of as a leading indicator to show that people are being more collaborative, that they're more comfortable in the space because, as you said, there's two reasons to put the headphones on. One is to give me some music that'll maybe get me into a flow state so I can get into my project. But the other is, to you said is, is isolation. Even if it's just signaling that it, you know, don't talk to me. You know, I might not even have any music on. I might just be completely signaling to people, you know, ‘Don't talk to me right now. I'm busy. I'm heads down.’ Do you see a change in behavior when people are suddenly immersed in this different, dynamic, biophilic environment that I don't, I don't need these anymore. I can take them off.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. We do. So tracking it and tracking headphone usage, that's hard. At least for me, I think some of our customers do track that, you know, I'd love to get a hold of that type of data. I don't typically have that but yeah, we do see things like increases in collaboration, changes in behaviors, those that we're talking about. We have a lot of clients measuring those. We've been a part of a number of studies where that's measured. And yes, we can create an environment that's more productive for people; it can accomplish two things at once, right? You can take care of the introvert or the person who's in an introverted mode trying to focus, right? That first draft. We can introduce sound into an environment that's going to reduce the intelligibility of speech so they can focus a little bit better. They're not as easily distracted. At the same time, we can be introducing some beautiful biophilia that's helping with their well-being, with their, you know, heart rate, respiration, not well-being as a fluffy word, but, you know, really helping with their bodies and minds. And at the same time, that environment is going to better support someone collaborating. They're not as disruptive. Again, they're not as easily overheard. And so people open up a little bit more and collaborate more. And yeah, that's been borne out in research too. That's me talking about it. But when we've been a part of a number of studies to where that's measured and we see measurable increases in collaboration, so people spending more time in these collaborative spaces where soundscaping has been introduced, as well as, doing things, that you want to see in collaborative behavior. So coming up with more creative ideas, novel creative ideas to challenging problems, things like that. So, yeah, it can have a big impact. It's not the silver bullet, of course. You know, the rest of the design of the building matters. Also the acoustics of the building is quite important as well. You know, we're not going to go into a building where you've got, you know, 70dB of noise and, you know, surrounded by brick and concrete floors and be able to do much by adding sound. But, you know, given those other things yeah, it can have a significant impact on those behaviors.

Jeff Frick:
I'm curious, do you ever introduce, like, noise canceling sound? It just pops in my head. As active noise canceling has become such a much bigger part of all of our worlds, especially, you know, everybody loves them on airplanes is where you really feel the benefits, see the benefit. Do you use any active noise canceling in some crazy situation like that, or is that just a completely different market?

Evan Benway:
Yeah. It's, I mean, I think it has applicability probably to the same markets, the same environments where we're in. Some people use active noise canceling headphones. Absolutely.

Jeff Frick:
But I mean, do you, can you use active noise canceling in a room? Does the concept, does the concept transfer?

Evan Benway:
Not really. Not yet.

Jeff Frick:
Not really, okay.

Evan Benway:
You know, you think about the airplane use case, right? Where your active noise canceling is so useful. You've got a lot of low rumbling noise, right? And when you flip the switch and you turn on your ANC, it's knocking out a lot of that low frequency stuff where the wavelengths are simple and long enough for the microphone that's in the headphones to be able to tell your inner ear this is what your inner ear is hearing. And it produces the anti wave to cancel that noise. It doesn't do as well with speech, you may have noticed, where you've got high frequency stuff or other sounds that are not low frequency noise. It doesn't do as well. And then that's also even just with a microphone that's very close to your ear. So then if you extend this to the room environment, for me to cancel the sound where you are, I need to know where your inner ear is. I need to get an anti-noise signal to it and not to your neighbor, because then he'll hear a weird artifact. So it's not, that hasn't been cracked yet. You know, and I think probably for some time to come.

Jeff Frick:
Okay. So you mentioned it briefly, you know, kind of your origin story. How did you get started doing this? What was your interest? Where did you see an opportunity to start the company and really try to change the world of the internal soundscape?

Evan Benway:
I was consulting with a large audio company in California. And then I joined the company, and I joined on the innovation side of the business, and I was specifically looking at sound, these problems that we were describing. So this company served all the big companies and organizations of the world and was running up against the issue that sound was such a problem. This company too, they were called Plantronics at the time, ultimately became Poly and HP, and they had just built this amazing new office. So if you know them, they're in Santa Cruz, California. Or they were at the time. So, beautiful place, but over the hill, quite a drive from Silicon Valley. And so they had to really compete for talent. And part of how they did that was they created a better workplace than anyone had ever seen. You know, they were growing their own food. It was solar panels with, you know, free charging for the electric cars that were being subsidized. And, you know, gym and meals, it was, you know, they were doing a lot to create good reasons for people to come into this office. They’d worked with just about the best architect in the world on that. And I came in on the innovation side of the business with a focus on sound and with my background as a musician and someone who thinks a lot about how I experience sound. I couldn't believe how unproductive the environment was. So that's really where it started for me, you know, tasked with this job. You know, find out essentially what we can do about sound, trying to do that in an open office environment. That, for me as someone who's fairly sensitive, you know, I found really, super distracting.

Jeff Frick:
So it was the open office. So they had all the amenities, but the negatives of the open office just destroyed your productivity?

Evan Benway:
Yeah, yeah. That's right, that's right. And so I looked into sort of what the state of the art was, and the state of the art at the time was basically it was described as the A, B, C ‘s. Some people still talk about this, but the idea is ‘A’ absorb, you know, wherever you can put in absorptive materials, which is really good to do. I'm a major advocate of acoustics and putting in absorptive materials. But, you know, a lot of our clients are putting in more glass, they want to increase daylighting for energy efficiency, for example. They wouldn't dare put, you know, carpet and ceiling tiles everywhere, lest they completely fail to attract new talent into the office, right. So absorption was struggling. ‘B’ of the ABCs was block, put up walls, try and block the transmission of sound everywhere. You know, the open plan has not, has not gone that way, right. We're not trying to build walls. We're tearing them down. And then the ‘C’ of the ABCs was the idea that you should cover sound. And so cover up distracting speech, introducing noise. And so use broad band noise, like, you know, what the CIA or MI6 have used historically to extract information, torture people. You know, you won't be surprised to hear I'm not a big fan of that, it causes stress too. It increases cortisol levels and is not the way to go. So that was I was faced with that as sort of the solution to the sound problem and thought, come on, there's got to be a better way than this. We actually developed the first commercial soundscaping product within Plantronics, and then they merged with Polycom. It was a really awful bloody merger. At that time, too, I'd seen that we were delighting clients with the soundscaping approach and was ready to start a company of my own to do it the right way. And that's how Moodsonic came about this.

Jeff Frick:
That’s great. Well, you know, Plantronics, originally their whole thing was, you know, in-ear pieces and, you know, portable ear sets and microphones for customer service people. And, you know, we all got them eventually you could attach it to your your little POTS phone or your little digital phone. And they were big on conference room speakers, the little three-legged thing in the middle of the conference room that everybody had. It's interesting, their approach was really kind of isolating and individualizing. You took a different approach, really going after it from the room level and the building level, as opposed to trying to forget about all those things—we’ll just give you better earphones, a very different approach.

Evan Benway:
Yeah, yeah. Completely different. Complementary ultimately, because you can, as we described, there are great opportunities to provide people with personalized and individual experiences using headphones. So I think complementary approaches. But yeah, if you watched what happened to that company and their stock price, like it was the wrong time to be coming up with an innovative, new business unit within the company. And so, was very happy to find a new home for that, for the idea.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. So I'm curious now, you've been at it for a while. What are you finding in terms of people's reception? How has it changed post-Covid? When I think there is a lot more intentionality about the role of spaces. Right. And I think, you know, hopefully at least it’s a big message in this podcast. You know, it's not about just having a space for people to go check in, do their zoom calls, and to do email, right. It's all about intentionality. It's all about having a purpose to go to the office. It's a lot about those three activities that we talked about and activity-based spaces. Has that been, you know, wind in your sails? Are people now seeing that sound is another really important piece of this concept, again, of creating a space for people to do their best work, which was not—I don't know that that was necessarily the bar that people were striving to before.

Evan Benway:
You’ll know more about that than me, but I tend to agree with you. I don't think people were striving, or had to strive for that. Many still probably are not. And, my guess is they're not doing a good job of getting people back into the office other than mandating it, right. And so Covid for us definitely shined a lens on this a little bit, you know, companies that—it opened the door for us, with respect to well-being. Suddenly this was something that not just Google was focused on, right. But all kinds of companies throughout the world. And so a lot of our clients are companies that are actually reducing their real estate holdings. So they're economizing on their real estate while increasing the quality of what they have. So, a recent example, we're now a part of what's the healthiest office building in the world, just rolled out, I think they've rolled out now eight floors of 12 floors, in London, you know, fully soundscaped. They've got lots of cool tech in the building, right. You can, and I should say this is part of a consolidation. They used to have a slightly sprawling campus outside of London. Now they've consolidated. It's a smaller footprint, but it's central. It's, you know, where you'd want to do the shopping. And where you might go to the gym. They have all the amenities in the office, from sound to space planning and technology tools. They've got it all. They're giving people real reasons to come into the workspace. It works phenomenally well. I'd say those tend to be our clients, companies that are doing that. Not everyone is doing that, obviously. I think too, part of my experience through Covid, given my experience with sound, you know, the fact that we think a lot about the sound and we experience a lot of end users struggling with sound and having their experience improve with soundscaping going into Covid. Pretty quickly, everyone was only talking about collaboration. If you're going to do focused work, you're going to do it at home now, right? And now the new office, if people are going to come in, it's going to be about collaboration. And people tend not to actually work that way. Right. Like we don't just come in and do one mode all day long. I certainly don't. And this has been borne out, most of our clients too—there's one of the things that a lot of our clients are struggling with the most, actually, is an inability to focus in the office. And you see this evidenced by the growth of companies, you know, producing pods, sort of phone booths for people to go into and work. You have a lot of clients who, you know, our engagement with them started because, oh my gosh, we're just, we have to spend like $20,000 to put one of these pods in. Maybe we should do something about the sound environment. So there's a lot more collaboration happening in this world post-Covid. But people still need to be able to do their focused work as well. And this has been a driver for us.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Well, the other piece that I would imagine would be a tailwind that Covid did, is it just increased the focus on the internal environment inside the building. You know, specifically more like I said about HVAC, once they figured out Covid was an airborne disease, but suddenly everyone is like, you know, do you have enough ventilation? You know, are you focusing on that? Are you checking your CO2 levels? While everybody's tired and falling asleep at 3:00 because the building is full of CO2. And when, and I'm curious, on your Asian clients, you said that are pretty much back, to full time back in the office. Everybody's going back. Do they now just see this as a way to improve the internal environment conditions versus the London example that you just gave, which is more of an active promotion of a very special thing? Is it seen now as kind of the next logical way that you can increase the livability of an internal environment, even if you're not really motivated by just trying to get people there, you’re just trying to make it a better space.

Evan Benway:
Yeah. So with the Asian clients, I think I meant and failed to make a point, which was, you know, a lot of the offices I visited, they're simply requiring people to come in every day. So it's really a difference of choice.

Jeff Frick:
That's what I mean. So if it's required, why spend the extra money? Unless you're really trying to think about ways you can make it a better experience as opposed to making it a draw?

Evan Benway:
Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. And yes, I think that's one of the reasons they're doing it. I mean, there are other things too that are sort of helping with this. The WELL building standard, for example, has had a pretty big impact, something that a lot of people, a lot of our clients are pursuing, either directly as a certification or sort of as a signpost. You know, they're following that standard to learn about how to make better, healthier buildings. It is about making more functional spaces. Also, I'm just fresh from this recent trip to Asia. One of our clients was in Hong Kong. And they've got, you know, beautiful offices. Looks right out over Victoria Harbor. And they did a lot to create this space that's central, that's easy for people to get to, that provides all the tech tools that they need. But that also really just gives them a better experience of the workspace, and I think it's, you can look at it cynically in saying they're trying to extract more, you know, productive output from their people, which is true. But they're doing that by, you know, making people feel better, right? Improving their attentional capacity throughout the day. Um, and as part of that, you know, you come in, you look out, you can see Victoria Harbor, you can hear the sounds of Victoria Harbor when you come in. You know, they've just created a better workspace that works better for people. And, and yes, some of them are more, you know, motivated by the clear ROI that they're getting from people. Others are more focused on well-being. At the end of the day, it's the same result.

Jeff Frick:
That's great, Evan. Well, we're running out of time. I want to give you the last word. For people that haven't thought about this, how should they think about it? How should they approach it? Or is there some really nice, clear examples where you can demonstrate that, you know, this has a really positive impact on people's well-being, which then translates into their productivity, retention, everything else about how they should maybe be thinking about the soundscapes in their built environments.

Evan Benway:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I guess the best, and this is a complete like, you know, pitch, but I'd say anyone who's interested who wants to experience it, they should just come into a building and have a listen, come into a building that we've soundscaped, they can experience it from for themselves, ideally spend some time trying to work there. But, yeah, we're rolling out, a number of, showcases that are specifically experience centers. And then we also have a number of clients distributed now throughout the world, where we can bring people in, they can experience this and have a listen. So I'd say, yeah, best method for someone who's interested is simply get in touch, we’d love for them to experience Moodsonic. Our biggest footprint right now is in North America and then, immediately followed by Asia Pacific. We have a lot throughout Asian countries, including Australia as well. So yeah, anyone who's interested, should just get in touch and we'll give them something to listen to.

Jeff Frick:
Awesome. Well Evan, it's a really cool story. And, it's one of these great, you know, things that maybe people don’t think about. As terms of top of consciousness, about how it can really impact people. At the same time, we all know how powerful sound is. We all know how powerful music is. It can translate you to different places in time. It can set your mood, it could change your mood. It can do so much for us. So it kind of seems obvious in hindsight, but maybe it wasn't so obvious looking forward and now with this focus on wellbeing and creating the environment for people to do their best work, what an important piece of the puzzle. So thank you very much for sharing the story.

Evan Benway:
It's been my pleasure. Thanks for helping me to share it. I appreciate that.

Jeff Frick:
My pleasure. All right.
He's Evan, I'm Jeff, you're watching ‘Work 20XX.’ Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll see you next time. Take care.

Cold Close:
Great.
Awesome.
Well, thank you, Jeff. I really do appreciate it.
Thank you.

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English Transcript

Evan Benway: Dynamic Sound, Positive Well-Being | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep30

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