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Psychologists from the United Kingdom found that listening to music has a negative effect on the ability to be creative when solving problems related to language. The participants of the three experiments of the researchers coped worse with the association test with the music turned on: moreover, with both familiar text and text in an unfamiliar language and with music without words at all. The article was published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Using the test, scientists led by Emma Tredgold of the University of Central Lancashire decided to test how listening to music affects creativity.
The participants in their research tried to build associations in selected words in four conditions: while listening to music with text in an unknown language (Spanish), while listening to a melody without words, while listening to famous music (in English) and without music at all.
The researchers concluded that the ability of people to solve problems related to text processing, may be impaired when listening to music due to the fact that their working memory is overloaded with information that comes through the auditory channels. At the same time, it does not matter whether there are words in the music or not, just as it doesn’t matter whether the language of the song being performed is familiar.
On the contrary, library noise, which did not reduce the participants’ ability to solve the problems proposed by them, is perceived as “stable” background noise. Of course, an association test can assess the ability of people to be creative only within the framework of solving tasks related to the processing of language stimuli; therefore, it is impossible to evaluate the influence of music on creativity in solving all possible tasks outside the language.
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