You probably love to turn on your favorite music playlist when you’re writing pitches, editing videos, or doodling concept art and storyboards, don’t you? It’s your favorite music after all – it’s fun, energizing and tailored to your taste by definition! But does it actually help your creativity and attention? It feels like it’s helping, but could that gut feeling be wrong? Could music in general, and even the pieces you enjoy, be a distraction when you’re trying to be productive? That’s a tough question to answer.
As a neuropsychology graduate turned Tongaler the topic really irks me and I’d like to tackle it. Consider this an informed, but informal rant about the nature of facts, the way psychological research is carried out and conveyed in the media… and of course, a rant on whether or not we should listen to music while working in a creative field.
So, to answer the question briefly: It’s complicated. Don’t believe every enthusiastic article out there, please!
From this point forward, we will be taking on the mantle of a psychological researcher.“It’s complicated” because in the organized science of psychology, findings between different studies need to be replicated. This means that multiple researchers need to independently conduct the same experiment and achieve the same results if we should ever dare to take their conclusions seriously. The problem is… that’s not how things usually work out. Often experiments give differing, even conflicting results.
For example, let’s take our simple question of “Does music help creativity?” Studies have come up with every possible answer from: “Yes, listening to music helps creativity” to “There is no effect” to “No, listening to music actually impedes creativity.” Heck, a lot of the coveted age-old findings of psychology from the 70s, 80s and 90s have come under scrutiny again lately and have yielded… “inconclusive results.”
It’s also complicated because we should not only try to confirm or refute a question, but quantify it. The “quantification” or measurement aspect of an answer is usually where the beauty of science lies, because it gives our knowledge dimensions and allows us to apply it. In the case of the question about music and creativity, we need to ask to what extent and under what circumstances does music have an effect on creativity. This more sophisticated formulation adds many more factors to the equation, though, and that is exactly the reason why it is so hard to give a definitive answer.
When we conduct experiments, it’s important to define every possible component of the question, and then choose how to measure it. But, lo and behold, psychologists don’t always use the same definitions and measurements! The more components to a question there are, the bigger the mess, because every single included concept needs to be studied and verified independently. If we don’t all use the same measurements or are not certain about the concepts we are using, the mess becomes even messier. Some people call this discourse…
Finally, “It’s complicated,” because it’s rather impractical to study human minds and behavior. Definitely more impractical than it is to study inanimate objects for example. Humans cannot be studied in isolated conditions. The effects we are studying are small, the human mind is vast, and individuals are different in a lot of ways. With so many factors, we need large groups of participants if we want to have the statistical power to detect the things we are looking for in an experiment, and that is naturally hard for many studies to achieve because of a lack of funds.
So… “It’s complicated.” As mentioned previously, science is not as clean as some Sunday articles might make it out to be. When you see a headline like “Happy music boosts creativity!!”, take it with a grain of salt please.
In any case, that was quite the big tangent and I was prepared to rant even longer, but there’s a word limit so let’s get to the point.
This blog post was actually inspired by a piece I read in Time magazine titled “Does Listening to Music Stimulate Creative Thinking or Stifle It?” Check it out, I find it’s one of the better popular science articles out there.
It mentions a very good recent study on the topic, which concluded that “listening to music while working significantly impairs creativity” (Threadgold et al., 2019). (Don’t despair! This won’t be a purely negative blog post, I promise. There is hope.) In any case, I agree with this study’s methods and analysis. I think the team that conducted it was made up of very good scientists.
The study measured people’s creativity by asking them to generate lexical associations between groups of words. For example, for the words “dress, dial and flower” the association would be “sun.” Participants did this in silence, or while listening to music with foreign lyrics, purely instrumental music without lyrics, or music with familiar lyrics. The fact that researchers split up the music conditions like they did allowed them to test if the music itself is disruptive, or if it’s the lyrics. You would be surprised how many studies play just a particular classical music piece, or just a particular pop song or something. Also, the way Threadgold and colleagues measured creativity is very appropriate because with three words, they could make sure that there is a definitive answer but it relies on participants’ creative insight.
But what of all the other experiments that reach the opposite conclusions? Well, they can’t all be bad studies, right? Eh, some probably are, but this just goes to show that there are a lot of components to the question. If music does affect creativity, it’s probably very context-dependent.
There are a number of theories on how exactly music might influence the creative process. Threadgold and colleagues, who conducted the above-mentioned study, contrasted between two main explanations. One is the “processing disfluency account” (Mehta et al., 2012) which essentially proposes that music makes it harder for us to focus, but since it’s enjoyable and puts us in a particular mood, we are more motivated to put additional effort into completing the task, which actually results in better performance and increased creativity.
The second explanation they were considering is the so-called “auditory distraction account” (Perham & Vizard, 2010), which proposes that any sound that appears in a structured, decodable sequence (music or speech, for example) is bound to distract us, because it carries information. And our brains try to process information automatically, because that’s what brains do. But this processing requires resources, thus it distracts us from the task at hand. The results of the study seem to strongly point at the second theory, because Threadgold and colleagues found that the participants who took the test performed worse when listening to any kind of music compared to when in silence.
I love this result, because I personally can’t focus while listening to music, even though I keep trying. Some people, however, are able to focus while listening to music (like my mom).
Creativity is not a flat concept. It is made up of multiple components and dimensions, and researchers have theorized many models that try to break it down to its constituent parts. For example, as early as the first half of the 20th century, it was proposed that the creative process consists of at least four phases:
1. Preparation: Doing the research – gathering information and exploring possibilities
2. Incubation: The problem is internalized in the long term and continued to be worked on subconsciously
3. Illumination: The “Aha” moment when a logical conclusion or extrapolation has sprung into consciousness
4. Verification: When the idea has matured and has been successfully tested for loopholes
As you can see, some of these phases rely on focused attention, and as we saw from the Threadgold study, music probably disrupts attention, especially when it has to do with speech. But there is one instance where focus is not required, and that is the Incubation period. If you need relaxation, music is amazing at distracting you from problems on the surface, and this probably allows more cognitive resources for subconscious processing.
What has your experience been like when trying to be creative and listen to a music mix? Leave your comments in the section below.
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Christo Edrev, working as Junior Producer at Zographic films, graduated in Neuropsychology from the University of Edinburgh, UK in 2017.
Note From Tongal: “Your Creative Brain on Music" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
