In a series of three experiments, a team of psychologists from Lancaster University, the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Gävle investigated the impact of background music on creativity. Their 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), disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving.
The popular view that music enhances creativity has been challenged by Threadgold et al. Image credit: William Iven.
“Creativity is a vital aspect of cognition underpinning activities such as innovative product design, scientific advancement, and effective advertising and marketing communications,” said lead author Dr. Emma Threadgold from the University of Central Lancashire and colleagues.
“Background music is an environmental stimulus known to influence cognitive performance, which has also been claimed to enhance people’s creativity for tasks involving spatial abilities such as drawing.”
“We argue, however, that there is limited empirical support for the claimed benefits of background music on creativity.”
In the new study, Dr. Threadgold and co-authors critically examined the impact of background music on performance by presenting people with verbal insight problems that are believed to tap creativity.
The scientists used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to: (i) background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics, (ii) instrumental music without lyrics, and (iii) music with familiar lyrics.
They found that background music ‘significantly impaired’ people’s ability to complete tasks testing verbal creativity — but there was no effect for background library noise.
For example, a participant was shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case ‘sun’) that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower).
“We found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions,” said study co-author Dr. Neil McLatchie, a researcher at Lancaster University.
“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 performance of the verbal tasks between the quiet and library noise conditions.
“This is because library noise is a ‘steady state’ environment which is not as disruptive,” the researchers explained.
The findings were published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
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Emma Threadgold et al. Background music stints creativity: Evidence from compound remote associate tasks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, published online February 2, 2019; doi: 10.1002/acp.3532
