Sound Masking in Büroumgebungen: Personalisierte und konventionelle Systeme können die kognitive Leistung steigern

Personalized and conventional systems can increase the cognitive performance: Sound masking, which denotes the specific creation of a background sound field, can reduce the disturbance by irrelevant background speech in open‐plan offices. Conventional sound masking loudspeakers are usually positioned in the ceiling within a grid spacing of 2–4 meters. Personalized sound masking architectures with close‐by sound masking loudspeaker positions are still subject to research. Such systems may depend on spatial masking release, and hence the loudspeaker position may have an impact on the efficiency. This paper reports on a study in an open‐plan office with laboratory‐like conditions. The subjects performed a serial recall task and completed a questionnaire during twelve different sound conditions. With regard to serial recall performance, a disadvantage was observed when the speech and masker signals were presented from different horizontal directions as opposed to the same direction. A similar disadvantage occurred when the masking sound was presented over conventional sound masking loudspeakers that were mounted in the ceiling. However, when the cut‐off frequency of the high‐pass filter that was applied to the masker signal was lowered from 200 to 100 Hz, this disadvantage did not occur. Since the sound conditions with masking from the ceiling did neither produce lower error rates nor were they rated as less annoying, these results imply that personalized sound masking could improve the ability to concentrate at work as efficiently as conventional sound masking