For the past week or so the 16-story atrium fountain here in the Compuware building has been turned off for maintenance. It’s actually rather weird to not hear that white noise in the atrium; I noticed it much quicker than I would have thought.

I’ve heard it off before now. They stop it late at night, but it’s more interesting during the work day. The massive open space without that water to dampen the noise lets everything echo quite a bit. Just walking to the gym on the second floor you can hear people across the lobby near the main entry talking; the acoustics aren’t so much pleasant as they are interesting.

In general there’s something about running water that’s soothing though. Most people will agree to that, but the reason why I think has to do with white noise in general. Maybe because it’s harder to hear our own thoughts, or for some easier to focus. I guess it depends how much you like thinking.

I remember back in college my buddies and I would often pick the section of the library near the ventilation system because that background noise helped to soften other conversations and let us retreat into our own thoughts. Something about that background noise (even when we had headphones on) was very conducive to concentrating. And it was also nice if we had to talk to each other we didn’t have to feel like we’d be disturbing everyone else.

I’ve always liked the water feature here at work quite a bit and I hope they hurry up with whatever they’re doing and turn it back on again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Anything and tagged with art, audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.