How a Bad Night’s Sleep Birthed the Sound Conditioner
For nearly six decades, a beige, dome-shaped apparatus has lurked in bedrooms, offices, and waiting rooms, where it is heard but not seen. In fact, not noticing is what the electromechanical sound conditioner is all about. This unobtrusive device helps millions of Americans sleep and concentrate by hushing the world around them. Manufactured by the North Carolina company Marpac, the device has had a number of names in its lifetime—among them the Sleep-Mate, the Sound Screen, and the Sound-o-Sleep.
However, the sound it produces has never changed—a nimbus of noise opaque enough to mask intrusive sounds or private speech, but muffled and mellow enough to be forgotten. Today, rebranded as Dohm, the humble appliance holds its own in a crowded marketplace of digital comfort sounds, competing against ocean-wave machines and rainfall apps by being, well, more ignorable.
The sound conditioner is one of the oldest examples of “”—the massagers, aromatherapy gadgets, air purifiers, and sound machines found in retail outlets like the Sharper Image catalog and Bed Bath & them. To better understand how and why Americans started plugging in machines to control what they hear and feel, I visited Marpac’s headquarters in Rocky Point, North Carolina, where I interviewed past and present owners, family members, and employees. There I learned the story of how noise was converted from an industrial by-product to a technology of self-care—the first entry in a now-bustling marketplace of devices attempting to free people from one din by creating a different one.
