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.

Comments

Re:Not usually in the purpose of listening

[Anonymous Coward]

Same. Oddly the best music almost goes away itself and lets me completely focus. While it's on all the time, I'll find myself actually listening to it during a 'break' and realize that I've completely not heard the last 20 or 30 minutes.

Connectivity is not Creativity

[SuperKendall]

They only gave one example of the article but I'm highly dubious of the ability to "measure creativity".

The example they gave - linking related words - does not to me seem a "creative" task, but more analytical.

I do think lyrics can be more distracting than music without though,

How would you know when you were done?

[circusboy]

A photography teacher I had in college held that the problem with creating artwork while listening to music was that when you are creating, you are creating until you feel good about the creation. if you are listening to music, it may make you feel good. How do you know when you're done?

over the years I've noticed that whenever I work (creatively) to music, when I look at the work later, it's always bad. working mechanically to music, (i.e. simply performing a process) it's different, because how you feel about the work is less important.