Most people often define noise simply as unwanted sound. It annoys, angers, frustrates, distracts, and creates stresses that could lead to physiological and psychological issues. Noise is invisible to the eye, but human ears are obviously quite sensitive to it, and it greatly affects many aspects of human behavior.

In the office landscape, noise is contemplated as one of the leading stressors that alters employee productivity and satisfaction, and in extreme cases, it can be the cause of impaired hearing and hearing loss. In United States alone, it is estimated that millions of people are exposed to dangerous levels of noise in the workplace due to the lack of appropriate office noise reduction applications, with one in every four workers developing hearing impairment over time. Most noted professions that have working environments that posit noise risks include firefighters, factory workers, construction workers, military personnel, farmers, heavy industry workers, musicians and entertainment industry professional. Even office employees working in crowded office buildings where phones consistently ring and computers and air conditioners constantly hum in the background are faced with agitation and increased stress that noise creates.

Due to the dangers that noise could bring, many companies and organizations are looking for ways to limit the hazards of noise exposure, and one of the solutions that is now widely used is the application of white noise generator units inside the workplace. Basically, such device emits unstructured sound in order to mask other sounds in the immediate environment. Machines and devices that are regarded as white noise producers do not necessarily produce genuine white noise, which can be harsh to the ears, rather they are designed to play sounds that are often heard in nature like waterfalls, rains, or crashing waves.

White noise devices are available from different manufacturers in a variety of forms and uses. There are white noise machines used as audio testing equipments, speech privacy systems, sleep aid devices as well as power nap machines. Sleep aid and nap machines, as their names suggest, are often utilized to encourage sleep as they are engineered to play soothing sounds that are either combined with or modulated by white noise. They are also utilized to reduce the discomforts of tinnitus and migraines.

In the workplace, white noise generator units are often employed to function as sound masking machines that could help improve privacy by drowning or eliminating nearby conversations and other foreign sounds. For instance, an employee could place a clock radio that has a white noise machine feature on his or her desk to tone down the conversations of his or her colleagues in the adjacent cubicle. Several studies have shown that the use of white noise devices in the workplace could significantly provide acoustic satisfaction to workers, especially for people who are working in open-plan offices that have limited dividers such as individual cubicles.

Most modern white noise generator devices are electronic and usually generate their sounds in real-time through electronic playback of a digital audio recording. However, you could still find white noise devices that have simple mechanical structure made up of an enclosed fan with a speed switch. With this simple set-up, the fan functions by driving the air through the holes of the casing of the machine and once the air passes through the holes, it would produce a soothing sound that could mask noise. With the options you have when it comes to white noise devices, it's about time that you boost the productivity of your employees affected by noise through the aid of these machines to get them back on track.