As a music listener I will point out the obvious flaw in the study: the “choice” of music was from pop genres. I find music with distinguishable lyrics in a language I understand to be distracting while music with no lyrics, or lyrics indistinguishable from noise (cf Rammstein, Björk, Enya) are far less distracting.

I use music to mask open office noise including customer support personnel on phone calls, ops people discussing equipment failures, and political trolls discussing my preferred party.

Industrial, death metal, and recordings of rainfall all work just as well for me. Though in the case of rainfall I find about twenty minutes of the same sound is about my limit before I need more texture in my auditory diet. Silence just makes my ears ring louder until after a few minutes it is physically painful to not have some noise.

The issue of masking background conversations was not covered. I find that wearing isolating earphones, earmuffs, etc only serves to strain me further since I can still hear conversations but I have to listen harder to make out the words.

Perhaps I have some undiagnosed anxiety or paranoia but for me, isolation/silence does not work as well as masking.