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Listening To Music May Be Damaging Your Creativity (newatlas.com)
The results of a new study suggest that listening to music can significantly impair your ability to perform creative tasks. Whilst music was found to disrupt creative processes, ambient "library noise" was found to have no significant effect. From a report: The first experiment saw volunteers complete tasks while being played music with vocals that wouldn't mean anything to them -- for example, English-speaking listeners being played music with Spanish lyrics. In the second experiment, the participants were played instrumental music with no vocals, and in the third the volunteers were played music with familiar lyrics that they could understand. During the third experiment, the participants were also subjected to "library noise" conditions, which involved ambient noise such as unintelligible distant speech, photocopier noise, typing, and the rustling of papers.
The team discovered that creative performance dropped significantly when listening to music over the course of all three exercises, as compared to periods during which participants were allowed to complete the exercises without distraction. Even when participants declared that the music improved their overall mood, in the third exercise, it still impaired creativity.
The team discovered that creative performance dropped significantly when listening to music over the course of all three exercises, as compared to periods during which participants were allowed to complete the exercises without distraction. Even when participants declared that the music improved their overall mood, in the third exercise, it still impaired creativity.
I know I'm not alone here but many people listen to music to muffle the distracting chit-chat of office space. That unconscious listening to other peoples conversion is far more detrimental to creativity/focus that listening to music. Maybe I'm a bit more susceptible to it than others because I have ADHD, but I often find myself being pulled in to other conversions even when I don't need to be in them. I find using intramental music works the best to keep focused. I know anything with lyrics engages my brain in a different way that makes it hard to concentrate on a task.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I work in a noisy environment (lots of people talking about interesting things that I'm not supposed to listen to), so noise-cancelling headphones are a godsend. They need some sound to work well, though.
After reading this article I decided to try to listen to video game music while working instead of the usual classic concentration tracks. I do not need to be relaxed to work, on the contrary. After having tested video game music for a few weeks, I feel it makes a big positive difference.