The office that sounded like machinery

These are listed in the order worth acting on, which with the office soundscape is not the order they are usually presented in.

Work used to be audible

Typewriters, telex machines, adding machines, duplicators and telephone bells made a large office continuously and specifically noisy. The sound was differentiated: you could hear which machine, roughly how fast, and whether somebody had stopped. Colleagues therefore had a constant ambient sense of who was working and at what pace, without anyone reporting anything.

That awareness was mutual and symmetrical, which is the crucial difference from what replaced it.

The carriage return marked progress

A manual typewriter announced the end of every line with a bell and a lever, so a document's progress was audible from across the room. That gave typed work a rhythm and a measurable pace, and experienced typists were recognisable by it. Word processing removed all of it, and typing became silent, continuous and impossible to overhear.

For a while, a visible unit of progress disappeared from the working day.

Silence changed the surveillance question

When work stopped being audible, employers lost an informal signal about activity, and formal monitoring filled the gap. Keystroke logging, activity trackers and status indicators do the same job asymmetrically, reporting upward rather than to everyone. The old signal was available to peers as well as supervisors; the new one generally is not.

That asymmetry, rather than the monitoring itself, is what most people object to.

Open plan was designed for a quieter world

Open-plan layouts spread as equipment became quieter, since the earlier machine noise would have made them intolerable. The dominant noise then became human speech, which research consistently finds more disruptive to concentration than mechanical noise. Intelligible speech is the specific problem, because language interferes with verbal working memory in a way steady noise does not.

The office got quieter in decibels and worse for concentration at the same time.

Mechanical sound came back as a purchase

Mechanical keyboards are sold explicitly on their sound and feel, at considerable prices, to people who could type silently. The stated appeal is feedback: a physical confirmation that an action registered, which silent inputs lack. Software adds artificial keyboard clicks on touchscreens for the same reason.

In truth, feedback is a real interface requirement, and removing it created a market for putting it back.

The record here is thinner than it should be, and much of it was never written down.

The teleprinter was an alarm as well as a printer

News agency teleprinters rang bells to indicate urgency, with more bells for more important stories, and newsrooms were organised around listening for them. That is a priority signal implemented as sound, understood instantly by everyone in the room. Notification systems reproduce the idea and deliver it privately to individuals rather than publicly to a room.

The newsroom heard the news arrive together; now everyone receives it separately and slightly differently.

Everything above, in order of what to do first

1. Work used to be audible. Typewriters, telex machines, adding machines, duplicators and telephone bells made a large office continuously and specifically noisy.
2. The carriage return marked progress. A manual typewriter announced the end of every line with a bell and a lever, so a document's progress was audible from across the room.
3. Silence changed the surveillance question. When work stopped being audible, employers lost an informal signal about activity, and formal monitoring filled the gap.
4. Open plan was designed for a quieter world. Open-plan layouts spread as equipment became quieter, since the earlier machine noise would have made them intolerable.
5. Mechanical sound came back as a purchase. Mechanical keyboards are sold explicitly on their sound and feel, at considerable prices, to people who could type silently.
6. The teleprinter was an alarm as well as a printer. News agency teleprinters rang bells to indicate urgency, with more bells for more important stories, and newsrooms were organised around listening for them.

The takeaway

You used to be able to hear whether the room was working. What replaced that hears only you, and only reports upward.

Nobody decided to stop. It simply stopped being worth the effort.