Study: Music Disrupts the Creative Process

[Ron Texas]

https://newatlas.com/listening-music-damaging-creativity/58668/

They also say that library noise has no detrimental effect. Is the growing popularity of desktop systems reducing productivity?

Note, I do not endorse or attack this study. All I did was stumble across it.

 

[cjfrbw]

I am glad social and cognitive science use such a precise and agreed upon metric such as 'creativity'. "The total harmonic distortion of creativity was 10 percent when listening to music, and 0.1 percent without."

 

[Ron Texas]

"Participants in the project all spoke English as their first language, and had no deficiencies of sight or hearing. Three experiments were conducted in which the volunteers were asked to carry out a series of tasks commonly used to measure creative verbal performance. For example, an individual would be presented with a set of three words, like stick, maker and point, and asked to find the linking word. In this example the answer would be "match."

That's the methodology. I suppose the key words are "commonly used to measure creative verbal performance". The extent to which those tests are accepted and proven would have a strong bearing on the validity of the study.

 

[RayDunzl]

That doesn't bode well for our composer sitting at his piano listening to snippets of his creation, does it?

I wonder how better he should he approach his task.

 

[cjfrbw]

Just my general gripe against these social studies type thingies. They don't even have a handle on their definitions or methods of measurement. They try to 'sound' meaningful while saying basically nothing or saying something trivial like 'listening to music while studying is distracting'.

 

[Ron Texas]

@RayDunzl obviously, it would be difficult to compose, perform or mix music without hearing it. However, the music is the subject of the creativity and not a competing stimulus. It would be hilarious if they did this with IQ tests and found it lowered IQ's by 10 or 20 points.

 

[Sergei]

Yes, I believe this. There were earlier studies that came to similar conclusion.

I think that music is good for starting the creative juices flowing, yet need to be tuned down while the creative process is in progress. Intense concentration during sustained flow state is better assisted by silence.

Interestingly enough, listening to background music on headphones can be still better (~20% productivity drop on software development tasks) than trying to work with open ears in a noisy open-floor-plan office (~40% productivity drop).

 

[Soniclife]

obviously, it would be difficult to compose, perform or mix music without hearing it.

Tell that to Beethoven.

 

[Ron Texas]

Tell that to Beethoven.

I said difficult, not impossible.

 

[VMAT4]

When I listen to music I like, I listen to it! I'm focused on it. I don't want to be distracted by "creative tasks".
Music I don't like I try to "tune out". Guess I'm not good at multi tasking.

But what did the article say about volume levels? At what volume level does music become background music?
Did participants select the style of music they heard? I have loads of questions about this study.

 

[flipflop]

@VMAT4 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/acp.3532

 

[VMAT4]

Thank You flipflop. I see the SPLs used were between 60 dB (conversation) and 70 dB ( a vacuum cleaner at 1 meter).
I would call background music somewhere between 50 dB and 60 dB. See this chart.

 

[DuxServit]

The original title of the paper is “Background music stints creativity: Evidence from compound remote associate tasks”. (I hate it when journalists change titles to make their article attractive).

Actually the paper is quite interesting:

“The key empirical referent for this so‐called “irrelevant sound effect” is the changing‐state effect. This concerns the finding that a changing sequence of sounds, regardless of whether the changes occur on a speech carrier (e.g., a sequence of different verbal tokens) or a nonspeech carrier (e.g., a sequence of tones of different fre- quency), disrupts serial recall to a far greater extent than a nonchanging or steady‐state sound (e.g., a repeated token or tone; Jones & Macken, 1993; Jones, Madden, & Miles, 1992).”

 

[DuxServit]

@RayDunzl obviously, it would be difficult to compose, perform or mix music without hearing it. However, the music is the subject of the creativity and not a competing stimulus. It would be hilarious if they did this with IQ tests and found it lowered IQ's by 10 or 20 points.

I think most musicians/composers would find it hard to compose their own music while listening to other music as background.

One of the points of the paper is that background music disrupts the serial recall capability of the mind, which consequently means the mind can’t do “deep thinking”.

 

[Sancus]

This is very easy for me to believe, since I often turn background music off when I really want to concentrate on solving a problem. Even though I sometimes like having it on while working, I have no doubt that it is a distraction.

 

[maxxevv]

Its dependent on the phase of the task at hand for me.

When I'm at the initial "search" phase where I'm drifting in and out of ideas and constant state of flux in solving a creative problem at work, lively, not too loud music helps.

When that is passed, and I need to delve in deep with specific details to look at and whole list of checks to run through, its important that I do not get disturbed. Else its barely productive or I make mistakes along the way. So the music either goes into minimal mode or completely off.

 

[daftcombo]

I also noticed that plans & ideas come easier to my mind when I sit without music.

On the other hand, music helps me falling asleep.

So I'd say: for a creative life, no music before 10pm!