Sen Sound

Sen Sound is a social enterprise transforming the sound environment in hospitals. We make love audible — for a future more human — through human-centered sound design. Studies show that excessive noise increases patients' perception of pain while heightening anxiety and stress. It leads to reduced sleep and hinders recovery during hospitalization. For staff, noise contributes to burnout, stress symptoms, hearing damage, decreased mental efficiency and short-term memory. Excessive noise increases medical, nursing, and communication errors, and promotes a culture of “learned helplessness.” Improvements to the sound environment have been shown to improve all of these. At Sen Sound, we believe we have a moral responsibility to alleviate unnecessary noise, and unnecessary suffering. Sen Sound’s founder and principal consultant, Yoko K. Sen, is an award-winning musician and sound engineer, Citizen Artist Fellow at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performance Arts, and Halcyon Incubator fellow, who has spent long hours in hospitals as a patient herself. Sen Sound partners with Johns Hopkins Sibley Innovation Hub in Washington DC. Our “My Last Sound” project was selected as a “Top Idea” by Open IDEO End of Life Challenge in 2016.