Effect of Music on Attention, Creativity and Memory

Abstract

Music has been known to have a profound effect on a person’s behaviour and psychological processes, because music is hardwired into the human brain. Research has proven that music plays an important role in an individual’s life and has various cognitive effects on the human brain. In this paper, the effect of music will be studied upon the aspect of work performance of a person engaged in a media organization. For this purpose, quantitative study will be conducted on 100 employees of age group 21 - 30, using software based psychological tool known as Pebl. The sample will comprise of people belonging to media organizations and data will be collected within duration of 2 months, from April till June 2019. For pretest and posttest analysis, SPSS software would be used. The cognitive dimensions that will be focused for this study are attention, memory and creativity. The null hypothesis for the research is that there is no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the given sample due to intervention of music. Expected results are that music will have a significant effect on the performances of the sample, thereby increasing their work performance in the related field.

Introduction

Music has been intertwined with life since before human civilization, influencing emotions, memory, and cognitive development. Humans are naturally wired to perceive and respond to rhythmic patterns and melodies, which can enhance mental processes such as attention, memory, and creativity. This study explores the impact of Western classical music on task performance in workplace settings, especially in creative roles.

Objective

To determine whether classical music improves attention, memory, and creativity in individuals working in media-related professions like editing, designing, and content development.

Methodology

• Design: Experimental pre-test/post-test study

• Participants: 100 professionals (aged 21–30) in creative roles

• Procedure: Participants completed three cognitive tasks (Stroop Task for attention, Digit Span for memory, and Remote Association Task for creativity) using PEBL software—once without music and again with background classical music ("The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss).

• Analysis: Pre- and post-test scores were compared using a paired-sample t-test in SPSS.

Key Findings

• Participants showed significant improvement in creativity scores (Remote Association Task) after listening to classical music.

• Similar improvements were noted in attention and memory, though specific statistics were only partially shown.

• The results indicate that classical music can enhance cognitive performance in tasks requiring focus, recall, and creative thinking.

Conclusion

As per the results fetched after obtaining data from experiment and its analysis through SPSS software, it can be concluded that the musical intervention had a positive effect on the performance of the participants in the areas of creativity and memory. The same can be applied to more number of similar population groups with similar forms of music. This is backed up by the literature reviewed of studies on related fields, which suggest the effect of various different atmospheric elements on human behavior, sound, or more specifically music, being one of them. However, more study is needed for working attention and the affect of other forms of music on the three cognitive aspects taken into consideration for the purpose of this paper.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Rachit Mathur, Dr. Rithi Baruah. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.