Here is Silente, the perfect chair for working from home without headphones

Japanese technology, Italian design: it sounds like a slogan from the 1980s. Instead, we have to start here to tell the story of Silente, the new chair designed by Luxy and developed in collaboration with NTT Sonority and Tangity, the Italian design studio that is part of the Japanese giant's network. The idea was born during the pandemic, when we all found ourselves working from home in smartworking.

Tangity's design director, Andrea Arzenton, who we met at NTT Data's Italian headquarters, tells me: 'We wanted a chair that was elegant and not the usual office chair and, at the same time, did not force us to isolate ourselves from the noise of the house with headphones'. Silente is in fact presented as the world's first chair that allows you to experience all music and sound sources without using headphones or earphones and without someone next to you being able to hear, not even a buzz. It connects like a normal Bluetooth speaker and incorporates a long-life rechargeable battery. It works on the principle of active noise cancellation, creating an equal and opposite sound wave to cancel out external noise. The two fins, inside which are the audio speakers, have a built-in microphone that cancels out surrounding noise and transmits only the sound of your own voice.

The technology is in the headrest that can also be used in other designs by other designers. The mode can be either purchase of the technology (headrest and control interface) or revenue share on sales. We tested it both in conference call version, simulating a phone call, and also by simply connecting a sound source and listening to music. To make the test credible, a device simulated office noise. The atmosphere is strange at first, because it has no headphones but you feel you are isolated, the sound does not leak into the environment. The volume, which can be changed, appears lower, but also because we are immersed in noise pollution that forces us to a higher sound pressure. At the same time, the sound does not disperse into the environment and therefore, in an open-plan office, for example, does not disturb with excessively high voice tones of those who normally use headphones. It is not designed for listening to music, they confirm, in the sense that there is no high-resolution audio or the technologies we find in audiophile speakers. There is no equaliser, the designer explains to me, but a proprietary algorithm designed in Japan that has the task of recreating this sort of 'bubble effect'.

The chair, which targets the market not only of smartworkers but also of c-level professionals and managers, will be on the market in early spring 2025 and priced below three thousand euros.