Recent Studies state that listening to music can significantly impair people’s ability to complete creative tasks. Earlier studies state that music enhances creativity and had challenged by researchers who state that it had the opposite effect. Psychologists from the University of Central Lancashire, the University of Gävle in Sweden and Lancaster University investigated the impact of background music on performance by presenting people with verbal insight problems that are believed to tap creativity.
Results published in the Journal Applied Psychology states that background music “significantly impaired” people’s ability to complete tasks testing verbal creativity – but there was no effect for background library noise. The researchers used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics, instrumental music without lyrics, music with familiar lyrics. Strong evidence was found when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions.
Researchers suggested that this may be because music disrupts verbal working memory. The third experiment – exposure to music with familiar lyrics- impaired creativity regardless of whether the music also boosted mood, induced a positive mood, was liked by the participants, or whether participants typically studied in the presence of music.
However, there was no significant difference in the performance of the verbal tasks between the quiet and library noise conditions. Researchers said that this is because library noise is a “steady state” environment which is not as disruptive. To conclude, the findings challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content (no lyrics, familiar lyrics or unfamiliar lyrics), consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem-solving.
