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'Work flow' music designed to improve performance does just that

A small team of neuroscientists, psychologists and musicologists affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. reports that music created specifically to enhance work performance does just that. In their study, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the group asked volunteers to conduct a specific type of work assignment while listening to various kinds of music.

Prior research has strongly suggested that listening to music can alter mood. More recently, some in the music industry have claimed that listening to the right kind of music while working can improve work performance. Work flow playlists have begun popping up on music distribution sites, claiming that users who listen to them while working will see improvements in concentration, mood, and indirectly, performance of their work.

For this new study, the research team tested these assertions by recruiting 196 adult volunteers who listened to various types of music (and office background noise), including work flow playlists, while conducting work tasks (psychological tests) that could be used to test performance.

The research team found that the only type of music that helped performance was work flow. They suggested the increase in performance was due to mood enhancement and improvements in focus, which were due to the music reducing performance drops due to distractions.

They also found that listening to work flow music improved reaction time. Those volunteers who reported the biggest boost in their mood also demonstrated the best performance improvements and saw the biggest gains in reaction speeds.

The research team suggests that the results demonstrate the arousal-modal theory, which suggests that people who feel better tend to perform better at work tasks regardless of type. Their work also shows that the people behind the creation of work flow music have done their homework in identifying the sounds and arrangements that can take attentional focus away from the music toward the task at hand. Such music, they note, tends to have a strong rhythm, simple tonality, moderate dynamism and broad spectral energy.