Listening to happy music may enhance divergent creativity.

Listening to happy music may enhance divergent creativity. Listening to happy music may help generate more, innovative, solutions compared to listening to silence, according to a study published in the journal PLOS ONE

Creativity is an important quality in our complex, fast-changing world, as it allows us to generate innovative solutions for a wide range of problems and come up with fresh ideas. The question of what facilitates creative cognition has long been studied, and while music has previously been shown to benefit cognition, little is known about how listening to music affects creative cognition specifically.

What the researchers say: To investigate the effect of music on creative cognition, the researchers behind this study had 155 participants complete questionnaires and split them into experimental groups. Each group listened to one of four different types of music that were categorized as calm, happy, sad, or anxious, depending on their emotional valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low), while one control group listened to silence. After the music started playing, participants performed various cognitive tasks that tested their creative thinking.

The researchers found that listening to happy music, which they define as classical music that is positive valence and high in arousal (most J.S. Bach for example), facilitates more creative thinking compared to silence. The authors suggest that the variables involved in the happy music (in Bach the use of counterpoint e.g.) may enhance flexibility in thinking, so that additional solutions might be considered by the participant that may not have occurred to them as readily if they were performing the task in silence.

This study shows that creative cognition may be enhanced through music, and further research could explore how different ambient sounds might affect creativity and include participants of diverse cultures, age groups, and levels of music experience.

So what? It’s sad that music is studied less and less in schools since it has been shown to have huge benefits in concentration and many other areas of cognition. That certain kinds of classical music can enhance creativity is therefore hardly a surprise.

Generally music can be a driver of all kinds of behaviors and the creation of all kinds of moods. Classical music—especially that of Felix Mendelssohn, Schubert, Delius and Brahms—has been shown to promote recovery in illness or after operations. Music therapy is useful in treating mood disorders. It does not, however help plants top grow as a recent study showed.

Music is often used in the retail setting as an attempt by retailers to stimulate buying (unfortunately it has been shown to work). As a behavioral scientist I find this a bit ethically dodgy since it is an attempt to deprive people of autonomy.

What now? Maybe employees should be encouraged to listen to music as they work. A study in a recent TR showed that listening to music does not interfere with concentration on the essential aspects of what is being worked on (I am listening to Frederick Delius’ piano concerto in C minor while I write this). It’s important, however, that the music be the choice of the employee and not made part of the background noise. There is absolutely no evidence that musak in the workplace has any productive benefit. Thank goodness.