"Pink noise" — a remedy for the annoying noise of a cubicle workplace?

It's "a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices."

Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. 

Every solution brings its own new problem, but then you can solve that problem, and get a new problem.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

The trite phrase is "babbling brook," and here's an instance where using the the trite phrase would have been greatly preferable to the deviation ("burbling brook"). The point is that speech is distracting because it is understood. A brook sounds like speech, which is why we've got that cliché "babbling brook." This is the perfect notion in this paragraph: The brook is speaking but we can't understand it.

Now, I think playing speech-like sound to people all day long is a dangerous thing to do to the brains in the room. Hearing voices is a symptom of insanity. Perhaps the endless barrage of almost-speech will make people insane or make them feel as if they are going slightly insane. One could become paranoid that the managers are actually inserting messages in the indecipherable babble, and — who knows? — maybe they are!

This new noise is supposed to be the solution for the way all the real-person talking in the cubicle office is making everybody crazy. But, don't worry. If the solution is a new kind of crazy, there will be a solution for that.