Listening to cheerful music while working can stimulate creativity and problem-solving, a Dutch study has shown.
– Creativity is one of the fundamental skills needed to cope with a world that is changing faster than ever before, says co-author of the study Sam Ferguson from the University of Technology Sydney. “Insights into how to stimulate this important skill are becoming increasingly vital,” he says.
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In the study conducted by Ferguson and Simone Ritter from Radboud University in Nijmegen, 155 Radboud students listened to classical music while performing creative tasks. The participants were divided into five groups, each listening to one of four musical pieces or working on assigned tasks in silence.
The music was selected based on an assessment of how it affects mood and how stimulating it is.
“The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns was chosen as music that promotes good mood but is not stimulating as it has a calming effect, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons represented a cheerful piece, Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber was a ‘representative’ of mournful and slow music, while “Mars, the Bringer of War” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets was a negative, disturbing piece.
To test creativity, the scientists focused on divergent thinking, which involves providing multiple different interpretations and responses based on available information by creating unexpected combinations and recognizing associations among ideas and transforming information into unexpected forms. Divergent thinking is crucial for today’s science, technology, and culture because innovations are often the result of merging completely different things and ideas, the authors state in the journal PLoS ONE.
