Biophilic Soundscapes with Moodsonic

In the world of building better, we hear a lot of talk about lighting, air and water as being the primary focuses of wellness. But sound, one of our key senses as a human, can be just as important. Have something too loud and it can become stressful and hard to concentrate. Have something be too quiet, and it can become just as stressful, but from over concentration. That latter part is mostly a concern in commercial environments and has largely been addressed via sound masking and white noise generation for a while now. However, my guest today brings an alternative to that traditional method using their own proprietary AI and software, Evan Benway in his company, Moodsonic, uses biophilic soundscapes to create more beneficial environments in buildings.

Using an already in place sound system, the solution can create adaptive soundscapes that not only respond to occupant noise levels, but can be programmed to fit specific needs in specific areas. I’ll let Evan go into more of the specifics, but imagine a room where as occupant noise levels rise, sounds of a river start to trickle in, or perhaps for more focused works, the sounds of an environment shift to that rustling branches in the wind, or maybe even in a multi shift environment, the sound adjusts throughout the day to mimic the natural sleep wake cycle of the animals in that environment.

Moodsonic is a fantastic take on soundscapes within the built environment. And so while we have Evan here today, we’re going to look into what this solution can do and how professionals can use it in their spaces.

Nick Boever:

Evan, thank you for joining us today.

Evan Benway:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Nick Boever:

So I figure before we get started with our conversation, kind of going to the more in depth stuff, why don’t you just kind of explain to everybody what Moodsonic is exactly?

Evan Benway:

Sure, yeah. So Moodsonic is soundscaping for indoor environments, think offices, hospitals, schools, those types of places. So the term soundscape generally refers to everything that you hear around you and is increasingly being used in acoustics to better characterize the spaces that we inhabit indoors and outdoors. Soundscaping, as we use the term, is about actively introducing sound into these spaces to optimize them. So historically, we’ve done a lot in terms of acoustics. We’ve introduced some sounds like the sound of air conditioners into spaces. With Moodsonic, what we’re about is creating soundscapes that are optimally beneficial for people. So in offices, this is about providing sonic environments that are optimally productive, that are engaging, that promote well-being and various forms of physiological restoration. In hospitals, it may be about therapeutic outcomes, improving patient experience and recovery time, and then as suitable for these different spaces.

Nick Boever:

Now, how does that get delivered? Is it kind of like on the same vein as say sound masking or is it just regular audio?

Evan Benway:

Yeah, so Moodsonic is delivered by means of an audio system. We don’t manufacture or resell that hardware or anything like that. So it can be delivered in a number of various ways. And we have done implementations in which it’s delivered using sound masking systems. So that’s one way of doing it. Typically, there’s a bit of detail in that and typically, when introducing soundscapes and so I expect at some point we’ll get into the details a little bit of what that sounds like, what types of sounds we use.

But generally speaking, we use a lot of biophilic sounds. So the sounds of nature, which are good for big groups of people, and typically, that does place certain requirements on the audio system that would be a little bit different from sound masking. Also, in some spaces that are being soundscaped, you may not have the same requirements that a sound masking system would say with respect to uniformity of sound throughout the space. So the details there do matter a little bit, but fundamentally, yeah, it’s an audio system. We’re talking about amplification and speakers and some concept of zoning.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. But aside from that, yeah, one of the other things that I wanted to ask was going a little bit deeper into the sound and basically how you settle on what sounds to use, because the biophilic aspect of it was what originally drew me to wanting to talk to you about it.

Evan Benway:

Yeah, well, so we’re big fans of biophilia. We use biophilia a lot. And so maybe I’ll start there, although it doesn’t completely describe what we do. And ultimately, like I said, we’re about creating the optimal soundscape for spaces. In some cases, that may even include some kinds of music or other types of sounds. But generally, we start with biophilia because it’s a really good starting point for designing sound for big groups of people who have diverse responses to sound, who are doing different jobs, all inhabiting the same space. So yeah, we start really with science and psychoacoustics and how people respond to sound in spaces. If you think about other types of sounds that people typically encountered, maybe we can start with a whole bunch of problems that’s been pretty well understood historically, sound is typically the number one thing that people complain about in all of these environments that I mentioned, hospitals, schools, offices, certainly.

And when you look at what’s been done historically, basically noise has been seen as a problem to be controlled. The idea has been let’s reduce the overall noise levels as much as we possibly can. Let’s eliminate sound, create silent spaces. But unfortunately, silence isn’t really a good thing. If you go to a truly silent place like an anechoic chamber, I think the quietest place in earth is still a Microsoft facility. If you go in there, gosh, it’s a very uncomfortable place to spend any period of time. In fact, there’s some pretty … if you’re a sound person, you’ll find this fun. If you’re not, you’ll think, “Oh my God, I can’t believe people watch this,” but I do. You can see YouTube videos of people trying to best the latest record in terms of how long they can stay inside of an anechoic chamber.

And the last I saw something, that guy was up to two and a half hours or something, at which point, he’s losing orientation, becoming physically unwell. Buyer beware before you [inaudible 00:07:53]. But yeah, so supreme silence anyway is not necessarily good for us. Conversely, loudness isn’t necessarily bad for us. I’m from the California coast. Never once in my life did I hear anyone complain that the waves are just too loud there. Could you turn them down a few DB? Doesn’t happen. So the quality of the sound really matters a lot. And when you look into the science, which has happened in the past several years, people have started to question the hypothesis that silence is the best. And in fact, when you look at biophilic sounds generally speaking, and that’s a big broad term, and the details really do matter a lot, but generally speaking, when you look at biophilic sound, particularly a number of different types of water sounds, but also sounds like birds and wind and thrusting leaves and things like that, you see that people will do better generally in a biophilic soundscape condition than they do in silence.

Really broad statements that I’m making there. But to make it a bit more specific, things that we see, for example, in hospitals, we see patient recovery time improving. We see people making fewer requests for pain medication, so feeling less pain. In offices, we see cognitive performance increased, so people doing better on standard measurements of cognition, productivity, if you want to use that term. We see people doing better on creative tests, coming up with more novel solutions to questions. You can see it in brain scans using EEG. You see people doing better in the presence of biophilic sounds, having more alpha wave activity. We see physiologically, we see people relaxing, heart rate slowing, respiration slowing, which is not really that surprising. If you’ve paid attention to biophilia, you see that all of this applies to the visual sense. We do better with natural daylight, we do better with views of nature.

And it’s been in recent years that this has all been applied to sound as well. So that’s why we start with biophilia as a design principle. And then what we do is we craft that into some intelligent soundscaping that can be introduced indoors to deal with all of the complexity that we encounter there. So if we want to think about just an office, maybe initially as a starting point, think about the fact that in an open plan office where you may have 40, 60, a hundred people, you have some areas where people are maybe focusing, other areas that may be more about collaboration. And then even within those spaces you’ve got a pretty significant degree of diversity among the people in those spaces also, including sensory diversity.

So we think a lot about neurodiversity. In a typical space that we’re designing for, we’ve got someone who’s your stereotypically extroverted sales leader who wants to hear some buzz. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got someone who maybe is on the autistic spectrum or who is otherwise hypersensitive or doing focused work that requires less stimulation from the sound field. So we use soundscaping as a method of delivering zones of sound that can support all of those activities. And then this is becoming a long answer to your question. I’ll wrap it up here, but-

Nick Boever:

You’re kind of feeding into my other question in all honesty, which was going to be, give an example of how Moodsonic actually plays out in an office setting.

Evan Benway:

Okay. All right. Well, yeah, sorry I answered half of that question before you asked it, but yeah, so zoning is a key concept to think about first, and this is one of the things that we will work with on the various parties that we partner with on a project to define what are the zones that we need to enable in a space, what flexibility do we require from that audio system? Because it may be that you’ve got just sort of one zone of sound throughout a space, but typically it’s beneficial to have more granularity than that so that as you come from one space into another, we can deliver meaningfully different zones.

That’s for these different functions, focus and productivity, I’m sorry, focus or collaboration, like I said. It’s also for different types of people with different sensory sensitivities. And then also to enable us to adapt the soundscape to changes that happen in the space. So all of our soundscaping is created in real time generatively using algorithms. We don’t use recordings, we don’t use loops. Painful lesson learned was trying to play loops of nature files, which I introduced at a large audio company a few years back. And we found people identifying loops that were a week long and they knew that on this Thursday morning at a particular time, they were going to hear that bird again and it drove people crazy.

And so that’s one reason we use algorithms to create sound that’s more … sounds more natural, it’s less predictable. So we can introduce things like bird song, but then another reason we do that is it allows us to then adapt the soundscape in real time. So typically we’ve got sensors deployed in a space as well, so that as you go from zone to zone and as you experience the soundscape throughout the day, our soundscaping can adapt and change. So if we’ve got a really quiet space, just to give you a crass example, we’ve got a really quiet space. It’s early in the morning, there are one or two people in there, the early birds, the soundscape is right, the level’s right, maybe the contour of the soundscape is right. And then as we’ve got buzz of activity happening later, or maybe even not an overall high noise level, but maybe a particular talker is distracting even with a low overall level, then we know we want to adjust the soundscaping in surrounding zones so that other people aren’t distracted by them.

Nick Boever:

You had mentioned, you brought that up with at another company. Does this mean that you have been like iteratively building up to Moodsonic just working with biophilic sound in these commercial spaces?

Evan Benway:

Yeah, I have. For me, this journey, gosh, where did it start, I guess at being the child of musicians and growing up under the piano. I think probably for a lot of us in the world of AV, that’s a common thread and a reason that we listen maybe a little bit more than others do. But yes, more recently, so I worked for a large audio company. I worked for, they were Plantronics at the time, then became Poly after acquiring Polycom. And that was where I first started really digging into this problem. I was working on the innovation side of the business and product development, and we looked really seriously into these problems related to sound that I described to you. And posited an active biophilic soundscaping system as a solution to this.

Had some really incredible successes there within that company in terms of developing some solutions that worked and also many, many lessons learned that brought me to where I am now. So again, that was a great learning experience for me working with that particular company. And I have only positive things to say about it and the people there. But moving forward and when I came to the conclusion that the best way for me to deliver this experience was to create a standalone company singularly focused on building not just the right product, but the right go to market strategy, relationships with channel partners where we could have a win-win with this business. That’s what sort of led me to Moodsonic and the conclusion that we needed to set up a new company to do this.

Nick Boever:

And so for you guys have had a lot of success just prior to me talking to you. I mean, even before you guys launched, because you very recently launched the company, but even before that, I think for a solid two years, while Moodsonic was still in development, you were doing these deployments to different companies. And I know what we can talk about is kind of mixed across the board, but as far as what projects you’re working on now, now that you guys are live, how have you guys been doing as far as that’s concerned?

Evan Benway:

Yeah, so you’re right. We incubated Moodsonic beginning just as this global pandemic started to sweep the world. What an interesting time to start your new startup. Not for the faint of heart, but you’re right. We came through it, we incubated our technology, we used the time to test and learn and develop our product in partnership with some great companies. And since recently then launching publicly, yeah, gosh, we’ve got clients all over the world at this point. So we have projects in the USA, in the UK, Europe, India, China, Singapore, Japan, Australia, et cetera. And you’re right, we work with all of these clients who have us all NDA’ed up and we’re very respectful of that. So we don’t put all of our clients names on our website. But then there are clients too that we do talk about our work with. These are companies like major multinationals, Anthem, or now they’re called Elephants in the US, GSK, JLL, SteelCase. We’ve got some really incredible clients. Does that answer your question, Nicholas or?

Nick Boever:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was just curious as to where you guys had gone with it because it’s one thing for me to be excited, but I always like to see that everybody else is excited about these types of products.

Evan Benway:

Yes. It’s been really obviously an interesting journey that we’ve been on over the years, having launched in the midst of the pandemic. And I think when we initially launched, I expected this to be us to initially be focused on purely really innovative companies because it’s a new thing and we do a lot of that. But it’s also been really gratifying to see many companies, even schools, cancer centers, the like, focused on how they can use sounds to improve the experience of people. So it’s really broaden the market for us and for soundscaping generally, which has been great.

Nick Boever:

I think a lot of it just boils down to that people nowadays across the board, especially in offices and hospitals and those types of spaces. They’re really focused on being able to deliver this kind of healthy, relaxing, just overall better environment, not just to the guests, the patients that are going to be there, but also the workers in those environments as well. Because office space is office space. I think the conversation about health and wellbeing among office workers has been talked about for even well before the pandemic. Not to say that that isn’t the case with healthcare workers, but I know healthcare, it’s a very active, very stressful space. And so figuring out ways in which you can care for the workers while also caring for the patients is something that kind of factors into conversations whenever these structures are being built.

Evan Benway:

Definitely, yeah. Yeah. It’s really changed things. And in the world of offices, I mean, we’ve become really a key part of some of these companies strategies in terms of how they think about return to work. So both as an enticement, this is one thing that a company can do to demonstrate to their employees all the steps that they’re taking to create a better environment for people. It’s generally a really big win. It’s the type of thing that once you give people this type of experience, they don’t want to go back to that office that they had before. So it can be used for that, for return to work. Also, we’ve seen some really interesting things where companies have come through the pandemic and come out of it with truly innovative modes of working. So everyone’s talking about hybrid right now, and we work with, for example, a company that they’re a software company.

They’ve got a very agile approach to probably everything that they do and certainly their workspace. And what hybrid has meant to them is that now they have a much more structured approach to the workspace. So they’ve actually taken away a bit of autonomy from people. You now come in and team A may be working Monday and Tuesday, team B, you may be in the office Wednesday and Thursday. But what that means is then those teams get greater autonomy in how they use the space when they do come in. So team A knows that that space is their space when they come in. What that means for us is we can now provide those teams with tools to hack the space a little bit, and in particular, hack the soundscape a little bit.

We can provide more direct control for them so that if they want to come into the space on Monday and they know that they’re going to be ideating and they’ve identified that a particular type of soundscape theme works really well for them for that, well, they can activate that or have it ready when they come in. And then on Tuesday maybe they’re coming in to do some coding and it’s more heads down focused, then there’s a particular type of Moodsonic theme, soundscape theme that’s suitable for that. So yeah, it’s been really interesting to see how companies have changed their ways of working as a result of COVID. And we’ve been along for the journey too, developing more and more tools for using the soundscape to support that.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, I really like hearing that because it sounds almost like they’re taking the office space and they’re playing to the strengths of the office space, and they’re using Moodsonic as that sort of element where it’s like you have the opportunity to come in and have a little bit more control in the area as far as the environment and who’s going to be in there is concerned. And so you basically tailor make the space almost to the people that are going to be there.

Evan Benway:

Yeah, so in some cases, yes, we have the ability to do that and give people more and more sort of user control over it. Of course, we also work with a lot of clients who are not taking that same model. People may still have assigned seating and they may just be required to come in every day or something that’s maybe more activity based where it’s flexible, they’re not monitoring when people come in or at least not requiring people to come in at particular days, but maybe they have some flexibility in using different spaces. Of course, all of this has implications for the soundscape as well. And so we think a lot in terms of different themes. That’s a word I mentioned just a minute ago. So to give you an example, one of our favorite themes currently is Rottnest Island. It’s a soundscape theme that we developed working with some clients in Australia.

It’s based on this Western Australian island. To me, as a West Coast American, I sort of think of it as the Hawaii of Australia, but it’s very different. And the fauna there sounds very different, but it’s a really sort of imaginative theme that takes you on this auditory hike. And when I say imaginative, I mean if you’re there really late in the evening, or if you’re there super early in the morning, you might hear a humpback whale, but then during the working day where that would obviously be a distraction and grab people’s attention, we’ve transitioned away from that. We start with some [inaudible 00:24:48] chorus of some southern hemispheric bird song. We have some gently lapping waves. We take you on this auditory hike across the island.

And that can be used to great effect in some places and in some offices for certain types of people, that’s one idea of a theme. But in certain other spaces too, they may really have a different requirement. Maybe we’ve got software engineers who are really doing heads down focused work, and we know that they’re distracted by a marketing team that’s nearby, not to say anything or make stereotypes about marketing, but all right, let’s be real. And so in a case like that, we would probably have a less imaginative, less dynamic soundscape, one that is introducing a lot of the principles of sound masking to reduce distractions, provide some privacy too for those people in the marketing team. So thinking about themes is one of the ways that we allow for all of the different ways in which now spaces are being used and make Moodsonic flexible for those different requirements.

Nick Boever:

And so I figured I’d bring this up because this was something that came up when we were talking, when we first had a chance to meet over Moodsonic, and that is you guys like to do a lot of work with commercial integrators on these projects, specifically installing all the audio systems and working with them around that. And so I figured I’d just bring that up to let you talk about how commercial integrators play into the deployment of Moodsonic and what you see as it being an opportunity forward with them.

Evan Benway:

Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s a big opportunity through the right kinds of companies in the AV industry for systems integrators. Yeah. So we rely on systems integrators for the provision and installation of Moodsonic. As I mentioned early on, we don’t design, manufacture, resell speakers, amplifiers or anything like that, but they’re always required in a Moodsonic installation. We provide some hardware as well that generates all of the soundscaping in real time that’s generated on site because streaming into corporate environments or hospital environments, I mean it’s just a nightmare. So all of this needs to be, as you mentioned, installed by a systems integrator. Ideally on the best projects that we can do, we’re working with an AV consultant as well on the design and management of all of this process. So that’s always our preferred way of working. Then when it comes to installing the system, commissioning a Moodsonic system, we rely on systems integrators there as well.

We provide training and support for all of this because it’s a bit different. In many cases, the installation and commissioning of a system will be quite similar to sound masking, but there are nuances as well. And we work with systems integrators who are new to this to bring them up to speed to provide them with the documentation and training required so that we can get those done. Now, the other piece though that I have to comment on is the opportunity for systems integrators, because you mentioned that, and I think it’s really important because this is such a new thing. I think this is a huge opportunity for the right kinds of AV integrators to deliver something new to their clients to deliver real value to their clients. The problems that we are dealing with and that we’re solving forward with Moodsonic are really big problems.

I mean, we’re talking about wellbeing, engagement, return to office, like I said, big problems for our mutual clients, I’m sure. So there’s a big opportunity there for AV integrators to really differentiate themselves and deliver new and better value to their clients. Also, Moodsonic, there’s real revenue opportunity in it as well for systems integrators. There’s the entire piece that I mentioned that we don’t really play a role in, the audio system and I say we don’t play a role. I mean, in terms of revenue, we don’t sell that stuff or resell it or anything like that, but we can help specify it. We can help make sure that the requirements are understood. So there’s obviously a revenue opportunity there, an upfront revenue opportunity, same on the Moodsonic hardware piece of things, but then the Moodsonic experience itself is delivered by a subscription. So there’s a recurring revenue opportunity there for the right partners as well.

Nick Boever:

Very nice. And so in your eyes, because we’ve been kind of talking about this all over the place, and I feel like it’s a great opportunity not just for integrators from a business angle, but also for designers and architects just building out these spaces because as you mentioned more and more, especially in these commercial spaces, sound is a huge consideration.

I actually just recently went to a commercial design show this year, earlier this year called NeoCon out in Chicago. And so much of the showrooms that there were dedicated to acoustics, they were dedicated to these acoustical solutions. And so I figure acoustics are generally in the camp of dampening the sound, bringing down the noise a lot of the time. And this is a much more generative solution. But I just figure in talking to adding sound into that space, in your eyes, what do you see as the main benefits for this, for designers and architects that want to work with it as well?

Evan Benway:

Yeah. Well, it’s a question I’d love to discuss. I mean, I’m quite passionate about that and ultimately one of our primary goals with Moodsonic is to provide tools for architects and designers to be able to design with sound. Typically, architects in the US in their five year training or so. I think they get a week or two on sound. I mean, it’s minimal. I think those of us in the world of audio probably can recognize that we’re somewhat culpable for this, that the story historically has been just purely negative one. Sound is a problem. You need to reduce, eliminate. And don’t get me wrong, acoustics is hugely important. We always support proper acoustic design, but again, there’s more to the picture than just eliminating noise. So we want sound to be a tool that architects and designers can use.

And yeah, I think we’re at the beginning of that journey. First, we had to prove to end users and to the market that soundscaping could be of real benefit and that there’s sort of product market fit. And we’ve done that now. We’re starting to hit some real scale. And so that box is sort of ticked. We’re now at the beginning, I think, of this journey where architects and designers start to use sound as a design tool. So we are working with some architects right now on some especially visionary project and where there’s a really clear visual design intent for the project, but where they’re also then using sound to compliment that design and even inform the design.

So without getting into the particulars of a client project, we imagine having an architect, having a designer working on a premium office project that’s based on a particular area in the world, and incorporating sound, incorporating visual design, all of that, in harmony to create a multisensory experience that’s starting to happen. I think it’s really, really exciting. It’s where we hope to be headed with Moodsonic. And again, yeah, that’s our goal for Moodsonic to be a design tool.

Nick Boever:

Well, I can only hope for the day that I walk into an office building and I notice it in there.

Evan Benway:

Well, you can hope. We can also get in touch and make it happen. We can book a demo for you. So yeah, let’s make that happen, Nick.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, that sounds great. I want to thank you again for taking the time out of your day. I know since the launch you have been incredibly busy just traveling all over the place and so it really means a lot that you were able to sit down and record this, not just for me, but for our audience today.

Evan Benway:

Of course. Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a major priority for me as well to ensure that we develop a win-win proposition for integrators out there. So thrilled to hear from you. I’d be very happy too to hear from anyone tuning in if they want to get in touch. Yeah, it’s a big priority for us.

Nick Boever:

So before we go, what’s the best way for people to get in contact with you if they want to talk to you more about Moodsonic?

Evan Benway:

Yeah, well, I’d be thrilled to hear from anyone who’d like to hear more about Moodsonic. A first stop would definitely be our website at Moodsonic.com and then you can get in touch with us there. You can contact us directly. I use LinkedIn a lot. I’m happy to connect with anyone there on LinkedIn. Always happy to meet new people from the industry. And then I’ll also provide my contact information that’ll be available in the description with the podcast.

Nick Boever:

All right. Well, again, thank you for coming on and I wish you the best in your future journeys.

Evan Benway:

Thank you so much. And same to you.