Effects of Noisy Auditory Environments and Auditory Masking on Cognitive Performance Among Software Development Students : A Pilot Study

An increasing number of programmers choose to listen to music while performing programming related tasks. This study aims to examine how different auditory environments affect students’ cognitive performance during programming tasks. Specifically, it investigates the impact of office noise, music used to mask noise, and silence on concentration. The study was conducted as a quasi-experiment in which participants completed two programming tasks under each of the three sound conditions. The findings suggest a slight improvement in task performance when office noise was masked with self-selected music. In contrast, the silent environment was associated with the lowest performance. These results provide insight into how soundscapes may influence concentration in programming contexts.