Background music as noise abatement in open‐plan offices: A laboratory study on performance effects and subjective preferences

Continuous noise is played in many open‐plan offices to partially mask ambient sounds, in particular background speech. With this, the detrimental impact of background sounds on cognitive performance is intended to be reduced as well as subjectively perceived disturbance. Our experiments explored whether background music can achieve the same effects. Besides collecting subjective rating data, we tested cognitive performance using verbal serial recall. This is the standard task for exploring verbal short‐term memory, which is central to human information processing. Either staccato music, legato music or continuous noise was superimposed on office noise. In Experiment 1 ( N = 30), only continuous noise reduced the detrimental impact of office noise significantly. Legato music did not qualify in this respect although it did not diminish cognitive performance when presented in isolation in Experiment 2 ( N = 20). Subjective ratings in both experiments revealed that most participants would prefer legato music to continuous noise in office environments.