Music playlist that can boost your focus

Vishwam Sankaran, The Independent

A playlist of instrumental music with a “strong rhythm” and “simple tonality” can help people boost their mood and productivity, particularly while performing demanding tasks, a groundbreaking new study suggests. While a large number of studies point to music’s widespread effect on emotions, its influence on human cognition isn’t completely clear. However, many commercial music platforms advertise content claiming it could support or improve focus and concentration. But the effects of such content largely remain untested, say researchers from the New York University’s Music and Audio Research Laboratory (MARL).

In the latest study, scientists compared the effects of four different sets of music on the mood and performance of nearly 200 participants during a cognitively demanding test called the “flanker task”. The psychology experiment measures the ability of people to focus on a central stimulus, relayed along with a “flanking” signal. This surrounding stimulus is either matching the target or incongruent to it, requiring participants to focus and respond only to the central target. Four groups of participants with about 50 individuals each performed the flanker task as they listened to four different types of music, including those advertised to support “work flow” and “deep focus”.

These two music types were mainly selected as they exhibit pronounced differences in musical features expected to drive behaviour despite similar marketing, researchers say. Scientists also compared the effects of popular hit music and office ambience noise on the participants’ test outcomes. These included a lyrical song from an American music magazine’s “Hot 100” playlist, and a sample of “calm office noise”. The special “work flow” music in the study was sourced from a similarly named playlist in a music therapy app – characterised by strong rhythm, simple tonality, moderate dynamism, and a distributed spectral energy below 6000 hertz.

On the contrary, the “deep focus” music was found to be “relatively minimalistic” with a weaker rhythm and slower tempo, and a more reserved dynamism.

“Neither work flow nor deep focus music had lyrics,” scientists added.

“Groups were well-balanced in terms of basic demographics, musical training, sensitivity to musical reward, basal mental health status, and stimulus volume,” they said.

In the task, participants were presented with a stimulus consisting of a central “right- or left-pointing arrow” flanked by “arrows pointing either in the same direction (congruent condition), the opposite direction (incongruent condition), squares (neutral condition), or crosses (no-go condition).” They had to respond to the direction of the arrow in the middle by pressing the corresponding arrow key on the keyboard “as soon as possible”. In another set of tests, the correct response was to refrain from responding.

“Each participant completed 72 test trials — 18 per condition, half with the centre arrow pointing right, half with it pointing left,” the study noted. Scientists found that listening to work flow music had significant improvements in participants’ self reported mood from before to after the flanker task. The effect of work flow music on mood was also observed to be independent of variation in participants’ self-reported levels of anxiety, depression, or stress over the past week.

“This suggests that work flow music may be effective for mood management even when people are suffering from emotional distress,” researchers wrote.

Participants listening to work flow music also responded “more quickly over time”, the study noted. “This suggests that work flow music may be useful for people losing focus due to high levels of anxiety,” researchers concluded.

“Tiktok Music” Is Changing The Music Industry: Citing a limitation of the study, they said while each participant group was comparable in terms of their demographics, and music-related as well as mental health variables, there may have been unnoticed group-level differences. However, the findings are still consistent with a large body of research showing that listening to music can have beneficial effects on cognition including verbal learning, memory, as well as attention, scientists said. “We show that instrumental music intentionally composed to support focus and concentration during work — comprising strong rhythm, simple tonality, broad spectral energy, and moderate dynamism — improves mood and increases processing speed during a cognitively demanding task,” they wrote.

“This work has real-world implications for providing the general population with effective and affordable strategies to regulate mood and performance during routine work tasks,” researchers concluded.