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Music can have important effects on the cooperative spirits of those exposed to music, researchers report. A new article describes two studies they conducted to test the effect of different types of music on the cooperative behavior of individuals working as a team.

Via Bobby Dillard

When the office is almost too much to stomach, music can deliver much-needed relief on the job. Before you press Play, however, have a handle on when your tunes will be most beneficial for you and your brain.

 

Learning = Stop

Learning requires your brain to analyze and remember instructions and facts. When music is on, however, your brain has to process auditory data on top of processing the instructions and facts. Because of this multitasking, the brain can interpret the instructions and facts improperly, either associating them in odd ways or making mistakes about what's important enough to store. Thus, if you have to learn something at work, it's best to turn off your music, especially if you're learning verbally or through reading and the music has lyrics.

 

Noisy = Play

If your workspace is noisy, the brain will try to handle all the individual pieces of data in the noise. All that data processing takes energy you otherwise could use to focus on your job. It also increases levels of the stress-hormone cortisol and decreases levels of dopamine. Those hormonal changes negatively affect the prefrontal cortex, hindering executive function. Thus, productivity can go down, even if doing your required task doesn't require you to learn. In this scenario, listening to music can actually help, because it blocks out the other excessive input that could overwhelm you and keeps you calm.

Via The Learning Factor

If you want your employees to work well together and get more done as a team, it might help to pipe in some upbeat tunes. Research from Cornell University has found that employees who listen to happy music—like the Beatles's "Yellow Submarine"—are able to cooperate and make group decisions better than employees who work without a background soundtrack.

 

"Retailers certainly use music routinely with the intention of influencing consumer behavior," says Kevin Kniffin, an applied behavioral scientist at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and lead author of the study. "The point of our new research is to draw attention to the role that music can have for employees, whether in retail workplaces or any other kind."

 

Researchers played "Yellow Submarine"; "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves; "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison; and the theme song from "Happy Days" on a loop in a workplace environment, says Kniffin. "A definitional feature of happy music is that it has a rhythm to it," he says. "Happy music significantly and positively influences cooperative behavior," Kniffin points out. "We also find a significant positive association between mood and cooperative behavior."

Via The Learning Factor

Music is regarded as one of the triumphs of human creativity. But does music itself help one to create?

 

It's a question worth asking, since music has increasingly become a part of the modern-day workplace. Music has a strange temporal permanence; as art decorates space, so does music decorate time.

 

With so much of our time being spent at work, and so much of our work being done at computers, music has become inseparable from our day-to-day tasks--a way to "optimize the boring" while looking at screens.

 

To better understand music and productivity, let's look at the research.

Via The Learning Factor