Study: music harms creative thinking - sort out and discuss alternative opinions

Specialists from the University of Lancaster discovered the negative effect of musical accompaniment on the creative abilities of people. We understand the results of the study and discuss when it is better to work in silence, and when music helps to solve creative tasks faster.

Photo by Francesca Cappa / CC BY

Music versus creativity

In one of the recent scientific works of “British scientists” the hypothesis was confirmed that the influence of background music on the creative abilities of people is still there. According to experts, music negatively affects people's ability to perform tasks that require "verbal thinking."
')
In the course of the experiment, volunteers solved tasks for “compound remote associations”. Study participants were offered a series of three words. The task was to propose a word that would make up a number of new words by combining with the existing ones. For example, for “dress, dial, flower” the answer was “sun” - and the new words “sundress, sundial, sunflower”.

The speed of problem solving was checked in three different situations: participants listened to music without words, songs in an unknown foreign and native language.

The results of the first two tests were compared with the indicators when working in silence and with a quiet "library" noise, which consisted of illegible speech, typing sounds on the keyboard and paper rustling.

It turned out that any music distracted the participants of the experiment and slowed down the decision process, and the most productive people worked in silence and with “library noise”. The reason is that during the solution of the tasks, the test participants used verbal working memory, which “acts” not so effectively in the conditions of a changing background sound.

Another study that revealed the negative influence of music on creativity was published in 2001. Its authors tested how music affects the speed of writing an essay. The results showed that when listening to music, participants in the testing wrote slower and more often corrected the text than when working in silence.

Alternative opinion

There are also scientific works with an alternative opinion that in some situations one can observe the positive influence of music on creative abilities. Immediately, two of them studied the relationship of music and the speed of solving "visual" tasks.

In the first work, the participants correlated paper figures of a certain form in a folded and unfolded form, and in the second, they compared two figures rotating in different directions and determined their similarity.

In both cases, the tasks were handled better while listening to music: in the first, the works of Mozart had a positive effect on the results, and in the second, the favorite songs of the study participants.

Experts attribute this effect to the positive emotions that people cause their favorite music.

Another example with a similar experiment showed the positive influence of music on the efficiency of problem solving on divergent thinking , or the search for multiple answers to the same question. Its members listened to classical music with different "moods". It turned out that “happy” compositions have a positive effect on divergent thinking, the audience offered more original and useful ideas than when listening to calm or sad music and when working in silence.

The authors of the study explain this effect of “happy” works by the fact that they help listeners to “believe in themselves” and search for solutions longer and harder.

If you still choose music

It is difficult to argue with the fact that silence affects the efficiency of work and creativity, but sometimes you can not do without music in headphones (for example, in open-spaces and coworkings). It is believed that some genres influence creative thinking better than others. The first one is ambient.

When there are no sudden changes in the track, the brain is not distracted from the task, and productivity does not decrease . An alternative option with a little more variety is generative music. This is a continuous audio stream that collects a neural network from ready-made samples in real time. In such music, there are no abrupt transitions or tempo changes, so it is almost imperceptibly embedded in the workflow.

Photo by Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA

For those who love the classics, researchers recommend listening to music of the Baroque era - works by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and other composers of the time. Suitable for work and writing the era of classicism. However, only works in major key, such as Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos, D Major, have a positive effect.

As the musical accompaniment you can use the soundtracks for games. They are specially created in order to maintain concentration, but not distract the listener's attention to themselves. One of the most "productive" game soundtracks are the works of composer Jerry Martin (Jerry Martin) - he wrote the music for the games of the series The Sims and SimCity.

findings

The effect of musical accompaniment largely depends on the nature of the work and the mood of the listener. However, researchers agree that in solving problems related to text or finding the right solution to a problem, background music listeners work less productively than in silence.

The most optimal background for solving any problems is silence or white noise. The impact of the latter on productivity has been proven by research - under the white noise, people performed calculations and memorization tasks better than with music or the sound of speech. This effect is even used by some coworkers, such as the Boston WorkBar, which includes white noise in the “increased productivity” zone.

What we write about in “Hi-Fi World” and our Telegram-channel:

Go