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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Goodbye Valentine - 131 bpm - Music to Study to

I was out walking in LA's San Fernando Valley and this image was arresting enough to make me blow my target pace - it was the 27th of February and my heart just broke.

I haven't touched the piano since the beginning of the year, I had promised myself I would publish God Knows before I started working on something new, so - this is the first session back.  I'm playing with an old theme, all 7's and 9's and very simple but kinda cool.

Visually I finally get to play with my LIFX bulb - I saw it on Kickstarter last year and thought it might be perfect.  I'm playing with a click at 131 bpm but the light is reacting to the piano in the room - it's not quite where it needs to be yet but I think it's encouraging.

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God Knows - Music to Create Flow

The original title was "Fuck Knows" but then that's not terribly commercial is it! ;-p

The  track was built for the animation - I recorded the core piano and video track in early November 2013 and sent it to SAmi to play with.  I don't know what his process is but the end result always looks amazing.

The funny thing is, nobody actually uses the visuals when they're working, but with YouTube as the primary music distribution channel, you've got to have something cool  for people to look at so that ultimately they might listen to you.

These visuals are from SAmi , they're synced to the music.  If you do chose to watch the video, they're pretty cool!

Thanks SAmi.

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