Abstract
The psychological effects of external noise on participants were experimentally investigated. The study involved the analysis of the annoyance, subjective feelings of fatigue and performance of participants exposed to meaningless external noise at various sound pressure levels during a mental task such as reading and arithmetic that do not involve auditory processing. The task was the addition of one digit numbers, and the external noise was steady broad-band white-noise. The relationship between the sound pressure level of the external noise and the psychological response of the participants was discussed, as was the difference between the subjective feelings of fatigue after the arithmetic task with and without noise, and the effect of noise on their performance.
