Music

Listening to music ‘significantly impairs’ creativity: study

Want to boost your productivity at work? Perhaps try putting down your Air Pods. A new study found that listening to music can “significantly impair” our creativity.

Researchers from the University of Central Lancashire, University of Gävle in Sweden and Lancaster University gave participants a series of verbal creativity tasks while exposed to different environments. One group was placed in a quiet room, while other groups listened to either background music with unfamiliar lyrics, instrumental music without lyrics, or music with familiar lyrics.

Each participant was then shown three words (e.g. dress, dial and 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,” Neil McLatchie, a researcher at Lancaster University and co-author of the study, wrote in a press results.

Meanwhile, people who listened to music with lyrics they were familiar experienced disrupted creativity, regardless of if the songs boosted their mood.

The paper’s conclusions refutes popular claims that listening to music can help get your creative juices flowing.

“To conclude, the findings here 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,” McLatchie said.