Background Music Affects Your Attention

More data that digs into how music affects us - this time a study from the University of Lisbon looking at whether different types of background music (happy, sad, none) will affect what you choose to look at.  

A relatively small study of 63 participants were broken into three groups where they either listened to happy music, sad music or a control group with no music.  They were then presented with pairs of visual images - one showing a fortunate circumstance, the other showing an unfortunate or negative circumstance.

Turns out that the background music won't affect what image you start to look at, but it will affect how long you will spend on an image.  Sad music makes you spend longer on sad imagery and vice versa for happy music.

Not really a shocker but nice evidence of how music can shape your attention.

Image Credit: Trader of the Apocalypse by David Blackwell on Flickr

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Instrumental Music Better than Lyrics for Knowledge Workers

It's funny - we've been looking for this data for a while!

From our own personal experiences and just chatting with other people, we've always reckoned that for knowledge workers, a little bit of background music is good for productivity.  And to build on that, we believed that instrumental music was better than songs with lyrics as the words often got in the way of what we were trying to achieve.

This study from Taiwan in 2012 actually shows some data to back that theory up!

Over 100 participants in their early twenties were given concentration and attention testing within different audio environments.  Background music with lyrics had a significant negative effect on performance.

So, there you go kids - if you're a knowledge worker then instrumental music's the way to go - and hey - you might want t try some of ours ;-)

Image Credit: no kidding by andrea joseph - Flickr

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