Study: Music Boosts Productivity

Most of the time, music serves more as sonic wallpaper, spicing up the background while we go about the business of our day. For many people, that includes working. But is a particular kind of music better for boosting productivity?

According to Fast Company, deciding on which music to have cranking through the day’s tasks, though, is something America’s Air Podded workforce may not be doing with much intentionality. The choice could be informed by mood, by recent album reviews, by Spotify’s algorithm, or any number of other factors. But according to a new study, you may want to consider two important variables: predictability and novelty.

“Music is just such an emotional medium,” says Yiren Ren, a sixth-year PhD student in Georgia Tech’s School of Psychology. “It can not only modulate how you feel at that moment, it can also modulate the memory you’re recalling at that moment and how you perceive that memory itself.”

As a composer and a scientist, Ren has long been interested in how music interacts with our brains. She recently put her interests into practice, conducting a series of studies with Georgia Tech cognitive neuroscientist Thackery Brown, who runs the university’s MAP (Memory, Affect, and Planning) Lab. One of the studies examined how music affected a subject’s ability to process or remember new information.

To determine whether different rhythms and melodies made an impact on people’s cognitive abilities, the scientists asked 48 participants to learn sequences of abstract shapes while listening to different types of music. The study revealed that familiar, predictable music strengthened the participants’ ability to keep sequences straight, while familiar music tweaked to be more atonal put a roadblock in the participants’ path.

If predictability in music helps cognitive clarity and productivity while performing tasks, it shouldn’t surprise anyone who gravitates to familiar favorites during the workday. But there’s also something to be said for listening to new albums on the clock.

While predictable music can lead to greater cognitive clarity, music that is novel to the listener may, in some ways, allow them to stick with a task longer because it contains surprising elements that can jar listeners out of complacency. Or at least that was the impact it seemed to have on some participants in the study.