Music While You Work
From childhood, you probably know that iconic image of cartoon folks going merrily about their business as they sing “Whistle While You Work.” They’ve embraced a positive attitude to heighten their task focus even as they imagine doing something more fun. That may have been a winning recipe for popular music during the Great Depression, yet it also speaks to a deeper truth: listening to music while working can make a beneficial difference.
Mood Engineering in the Workplace
Singing (and presumably whistling) on the job has lightened the hearts of physical laborers throughout the years. Consider the field hollers of enslaved workers in the American South or the songs of barge haulers on the Volga River. But let’s begin our story in the mid-20th century, when electronic audio transmission had become part of modern life.
The classic example of workplace music starts in June 1940. That’s when the British Broadcasting Corporation introduced its “Music While You Work” program to boost productivity in Britain’s munitions factories. Statistics of the time suggested that defense plant workers increased their output by as much as 15% when serenaded by upbeat music twice a day. In the U.S., the Muzak Company had been attempting to create a subscription model of pleasant music on demand since 1934, involving both proprietary transmission technology and licensed performances. Muzak’s big break came during World War II, inspired by the success of the BBC motivating British factory workers.
By the 1950s, Muzak had become a fixture in many American workplaces, thanks in part to a programming strategy called Stimulus Progression. These playlists derived from data about the natural rhythms of the human body – early morning, before and after lunch, late afternoon – and drew from public-domain orchestral music by long-ago composers who had evidently mapped every possible human mood. There were also behavioral experiments such as balancing every 15 minutes of music with 45 minutes of soothing white noise, but evidently that wasn’t a huge success.
As public tastes changed and so-called elevator music fell out of fashion, people turned
to an expanding radio market to mediate the sonic environment of their workplace. Audio technology met the growing demand for working to a private soundtrack with ever more sophisticated earphones and headsets. For the past few decades, we’ve enjoyed constant personal audio for work, travel, solitude in crowds, and even sleeping. Just how healthy this might be for our hearing is a different subject altogether.
Of Mice and Mozart
Researchers are still studying the beneficial effects of music in the workplace, and there are two arguments for why the right soundtrack is a good thing: 1) music makes us feel positive about what we’re doing; and 2) music actually makes us smarter.
The feel-good aspect hardly seems to require scientific validation. We’ve all had the experience of that just-right music enhancing the moment, putting a sparkle in our eyes, a spring in our step, and generally elevating our mood. However, the mood-altering quality of music should be applied with care. Activation Theory suggests a critical gradient between stimulating assembly line workers during the mid-afternoon droop and whipping angsty young adults into a mosh pit frenzy. It’s fair to say that the listening experience should be programmed to achieve the desired effect.
The empirical evidence that music makes us smarter has been demonstrated by something called the Mozart Effect. That composer’s “Sonata for Two Pianos” (also known as “K.448”) stimulates the alpha-band brainwaves, which affect cognition, memory, and problem solving. After being serenaded by “K.448” for ten hours daily over the course of ten weeks, laboratory mice were able to run mazes faster and more efficiently than a control group exposed to Beethoven’s “Für Elise” (a single piano) for the same ten weeks. Was it the composer? The length of the composition? The number of piano keys struck simultaneously? Some ineffable quality about the musical taste of rodents? These questions remain unanswered.
A Personal Use Case
Music has always been a critical element of my working environment, serving as both a filter for unwanted stimuli and as a stimulant for those alpha-band brainwaves. My requirements are specific: instrumental music, vocal music without English or Latinate lyrics, and music that doesn’t evoke deep emotions. Genre-wise, we’re talking about classical, ambient, jazz, world, electronica, and rock instrumentals.
Why the restrictions on vocal music? As a writer and editor, I work with language, and English lyrics distract me. I also know enough Spanish and French to catch a bit of meaning, and this Latinate familiarity extends to Portuguese and Italian, so I try to avoid those languages as well. Now, if someone is singing in Gaelic, Urdu, Wolof, or German, I’m fine with that!
Why is emotional music a problem for me? It’s hard to work when swept away by the sadness of Maurice Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” the yearning of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” or many of Anthony Phillips’ wistful pastel landscapes. At the other end of the spectrum, I have a hard time not reacting to dissonant string arrangements by Kronos Quartet or the harsh guitar instrumentals of Fred Frith.
But there are exceptions to every rule. Something about the singing on albums by early Santana and Camel doesn’t mess with my concentration. Instrumental music from King Crimson doesn’t rattle me as much as Kronos or Frith. And with “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Ravel’s famous orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s lesser-known original) and “Friday Night in San Francisco” (John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, and Paco DeLucia), my note-for-note familiarity should make these works a music-geek symposium, but they’ve become more of a mantra.
These are just my habits and tendencies. You probably have your own.
With or Without?
I know people who need complete silence to concentrate. I also know people who thrive at their jobs when they fill their auditory environment with chaotic stimuli. My theory is that our quality of task focus requires certain baseline conditions, and this baseline differs for everyone. It’s further affected by the ease or challenge of the task at hand, our physical comfort and wellbeing, the inner noise of our thoughts, and our overall state of mind. The music that helps me sit in my chair writing this blog won’t be the same music that helps me crouch in the garden tearing out weeds. And as much as I love music, sometimes silence is golden.
Next time I’m stuck in a maze, though, I’ll certainly consider dialing up Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos.” Those lab mice just might have cracked the code.
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