How to Block Out Noise While Working: Masking Chatter, Neighbors and Open Offices

A colleague’s phone call. The neighbor’s renovation. A TV through a thin wall. Some noise you can walk away from, but most of the time you just have to work through it. The good news: you don’t have to make the room quiet. You have to make the noise uninteresting.

Why voices are the worst distraction

Researchers call it the irrelevant speech effect. When you can understand what someone is saying, your brain processes the words automatically, even when you’re trying to read or write. That competes directly with tasks that use language.

Studies of open-plan offices back this up. A 2020 review of lab studies found that the more intelligible background speech is, the more it hurts performance on tasks like reading and memory. Lowering intelligibility, so speech becomes a murmur, reduces the damage.

That is the key insight. You don’t need to block every sound. You need to make voices harder to follow.

How sound masking works

Masking adds a steady, meaningless sound that covers the same frequencies as the distraction. The distracting sound is still technically there, but it blends into the background and loses its edges. Your brain stops tracking it.

Good masking sounds are:

• Steady: no sudden changes that grab attention themselves.
• Broadband: covering the frequencies of speech and everyday noise.
• Quiet: just loud enough to blur the distraction, not drown it.

Which sound for which noise

Problem	Try	Why
Colleagues talking	White or grey noise	Covers the speech range most strongly
All-day background chatter	Pink noise	Softer, easier to keep on for hours
Traffic, drilling, low rumble	Brown noise	Matches low-frequency noise
A too-quiet home office	Café ambience	Fills silence without clear words
Sudden bangs and doors	Rain or steady noise	Makes peaks less startling

For a full comparison of the colors, see white vs pink vs brown noise.

A five-step setup for noisy days

1. Headphones first. Even basic noise-cancelling headphones remove a lot of low-frequency noise. Add masking sound on top for voices.
2. Start the masking sound before you start work, so the room never feels “loud” in the first place.
3. Set a timer. A 50/10 Pomodoro gives you a clear block to protect, and a break to deal with interruptions.
4. Signal that you’re busy. Headphones on, a status message, or a closed door.
5. Save music for routine tasks. Lyrics add more speech to the mix.

If you have ADHD

Noise can be doubly hard with ADHD: the distraction is louder, and getting back on track takes longer. Many ADHD listeners prefer deeper noise like brown or pink for long sessions. Read more in why silence can make focus harder.

In Solbox

Solbox has white, pink, brown, green and grey noise plus 8 textures, each looping without a gap. Layer a noise with rain or café ambience, set each volume separately, and start a Pomodoro with one tap. With Solbox Pro, Backdrop mode keeps the noise playing under music or videos in another app.