You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (15 page)

Overall, Kämpfe reported that background music had no effect on cognition and only small effects on mundane behaviours. The strongest effect of music she found was on emotional responses, but this result was still rather small and unimpressive. Kämpfe was also able to look at the effect of music over different time periods, as far back as the 1970s – she noted no systematic change in effects that aligned with the increased exposure to music over recent decades.

This main set of findings is, of course, a bit general as it comes from combining together the results of many tasks. We are most interested here in effects that relate to work performance; and helpfully Kämpfe broke down the music effects for different tasks. Here the results are clearer.

The types of task that are most relevant to work relate to memory performance, reading and concentration. When it comes to jobs that tax our memory, overall there is a slight negative effect of music on performance. When it comes to reading, the result is the same, a minor negative impact. It seems that when a work task is complicated and requires a decent amount of concentration then most people (NB not
all
people) would perform better in silence compared to music.

So after all that, is music helpful in the workplace?

I believe that music can help work productivity the most when we are engaged in simple, repetitive jobs, as it can
counteract the negative side of such work on our physical and mental state, helping stimulate motor movements and boosting mood and arousal, without dragging significant attention away from the task at hand.

When considering whether music is helpful or not overall, it is important to remember that some people do not enjoy background music and certainly not the type of music that was originally designed to assist work. There was a backlash against the use of so-called functional or ‘canned’ music in the 1970s and 80s. Musicologists rightly objected to the use of music as a manipulative work tool and the development of mass-produced music – e.g. ‘Muzak’ – for this purpose.
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There are many organisations who still believe that it is unfair to subject people to music en masse.
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The right to auditory privacy is one that must be taken seriously, as not everyone reacts well to music, even in situations where research has shown overall positive effects on both productivity and workrelated satisfaction.

When we are talking about your average working day in a modern office environment, there is little evidence that exposing people to music helps them to work significantly faster or better unless they are the type of person that already likes to listen to music while they work. In the case of such people, taking away or blocking music access will likely see a reduction in workplace satisfaction and decreased work output.

So the golden rule is choice. I hope we will never see an age where music is piped out in open offices, because the influences of personality, preference and choice mean that this action will likely impact negatively on as many people as it pleases. I am convinced, however, that providing access to music, for those who choose to listen to it in a private way, and encouraging ‘smart music listening’ (i.e. dependent on the cognitive demands of the task), makes for a better working environment than a strict ‘no music’ policy.

Music in the commercial world

With a thorough understanding of the effects of music in the workplace, we can now take a different route and consider the effects of music upon the consumers of modern work environments. What about the diners, shoppers and customers? How does the music we play in this type of workplace affect consumer behaviours?

Most of you are probably aware of the pop psychology ideas that music makes us move faster, eat more, or buy more in shops and restaurants. And no doubt many people assume that this is why businesses must be interested in playing music. However, the real story is much more involved and interesting, and many businesses could learn a thing or two by glancing at the science.

Just before we delve into the impacts of music on the consumer, let’s hold back for a minute and consider the people who work in these environments. Good businesses should and do consider the effect of music not only on the consumer but also on the staff. After all, we are talking about shops, restaurants, bars where people work every day. One excellent reason to consider playing music is for the benefit of the staff.

When I was sixteen I worked in a little gift shop in my home town of York. The shop always played background music and this was one of the main things I enjoyed about the atmosphere. In fact, this was the first place I was introduced to a haunting American vocalist and guitarist by the name of Eva Cassidy, whose music I have enjoyed ever since.

Quite apart from the potential influences of music in the workplace that we have already discussed, such as improving mood and boosting alertness, there is another magic trick that music performs in this type of environment for the benefit of hardworking staff: it can play with time.

Music absorbs time

We are often left bemused by the passage of time because our internal clock can be easily influenced by how we feel (emotional, tired, and too hot
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) and by things that draw our focus.
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Music that we enjoy can also sway our sense of time, by altering our mood and acting as an attention-absorbing time shield that protects us from being overtly aware of the passage of time.

Sometimes music causes time to fly. Time used to drag when I worked in my little York gift shop on a Sunday. On this particular day I was usually alone, with no one to talk to apart from the passing trickle of Sunday shoppers. On these slow days the shop’s enjoyable background music helped absorb the endless minutes as I dusted ornaments and refreshed pricing labels. I learned the words to the Eva Cassidy songs and sang along (in my head, to preserve the ears of any passing customer).

The new and interesting music captured much of my excess attention that was not demanded by the work tasks that I had performed over a hundred times before, attention that may otherwise have been focusing on time cues such as the ticking clock or the slow dimming of the light outside. As such, my concentration level continued on middle-ground optimum; the day did not whizz by but the music took away the drag.

Music for time absorption is equally important for consumers in shops and restaurants/bars. Waiting is a top annoyance – waiting at a changing cubicle, waiting for till service, waiting for your meal, waiting for the bill. The best businesses reduce the experience of waiting by adopting place filler techniques to break up your sense of time passage. An example is topping up your water to give the impression that although the thing you are waiting for (your meal) has not arrived, the level of service continues. Some businesses also use music to
successfully warp the passage of time in their favour. In this case we tend to find higher perceptions of the level of service.

An important point however, is that the relationship between music and the passage of time is not always oneway or intuitive. Music may help time pass when we would otherwise be bored and/or waiting but what happens when we are busy shopping?

Richard Yalch and Eric Spangenberg
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compared the effects of music familiarity on shoppers’ estimates of the amount of time they spent shopping and the actual amount of time they spent shopping. In a replication of earlier studies,
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people shopped for slightly longer when they were exposed to unfamiliar music compared to familiar music, though they actually felt that they had shopped for longer when they listened to familiar music.

How might we explain the feeling that more time has passed when the shoppers heard music that they knew? Surely this finding goes against the conventional wisdom that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’?

The researchers argued that when people listen to familiar music they get a boost in psycho-physiological arousal linked to enjoyment and that this effect can disrupt their perception of time. But because familiar music is more easily processed by our memory, we can take in more of the detail, thereby leading us to think we recall more time passing than when we try to process unfamiliar music. This process can lead us to overestimate the passage of general time.
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Think of it as a magnifying effect of familiar music.

Music and the consumer

Let us continue thinking about ourselves as consumers and the potential effects of music on how we behave in a shop or restaurant. Is there any truth to this idea that the presence of music influences how fast we move or how much money we spend?

There was a surge of music psychology studies in consumer environments in the mid- to late 1990s and there have been a handful of applied studies since. This number is still relatively small compared to other fields, largely due to the difficulty in carrying out scientific studies in real consumer environments. Although shop and restaurant owners are keen to understand how to get the best out of music, they are often reluctant to let a group of scientists loose with their space and, potentially, their profit margin. However, the work that has been done has benefitted our understanding of the impact of music in these environments.
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Does music make us move faster?

Yes, it really does. One of the earliest studies in this area was conducted by Patricia Cain Smith and Ross Curnow in 1966.
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They varied sound level (loud or soft) in supermarkets and found that people chose to spend significantly less time shopping during the louder music sessions. Interestingly, however, they found no significant difference in the sales between soft and loud sessions. It seems that people spent similar amounts of money whatever the volume but went about their business quicker when louder music was played in the background.

You could suppose many mechanisms for this effect; maybe people were annoyed by the loud music so got around the shop as quickly as they could. Not many people mention this possibility in the pop psychology consumer articles that cite this study but the fact that the loud music did not influence immediate sales that day does not mean that there are no negative effects of a loud music strategy in the long run. This study highlights the importance of not only looking at footfall or receipts – consumers can provide invaluable information about
why
they behaved the way that they did if only people would ask them.

This early supermarket study inspired one of the most discussed experiments in music consumer research, that of Ronald Milliman in 1982.
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Milliman was interested in the influence of music speed on consumer behaviour, rather than volume. He trialled fast (94 beats per minute or more) and slow (72 beats per minute or fewer) instrumental music as well as a no music condition in a medium-sized supermarket in the nine weeks between New Year’s Day and Easter. Importantly, the customers were asked whether they remembered music playing, although there is no record of personal reactions to the music.

Milliman recorded how long it took people to move between two pre-designated points in the store to give a measure of consumer pace. People moved slower with the slow music (128 seconds) and faster with the fast tempo music (109 seconds). When people heard no music their result was in the middle of these two figures (120 seconds). So the evidence suggests that music tempo was either slowing people down or speeding them up.

Of more interest to the supermarkets was the finding that people spent more when they heard slow tempo music ($16,740.23) compared to fast music ($12,112.85) – a 38 per cent increase in sales volume. An increase in spending in response to slower music has also been reported in restaurants in Scotland, where people dined for 13.56 minutes longer and spent 19 per cent more when the music was slow compared to fast.
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Were people aware of the presence of music in Milliman’s study? In the ‘no music’ condition nearly 10 per cent of people thought they had heard music. In the slow and fast music conditions this figure increased to a measly 12 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. It seems therefore that when there was music, it went largely unnoticed. This result may be a function of the age of the study, conducted as it was at a time
when music in stores was less prevalent than it is today. The important take-away point though is that awareness of the music did not increase significantly as the music speeded up, so the effect on consumer pace is not something that appears to rely on conscious awareness of music.

Many retailers base their music choice on reports of the Milliman study, and I can see why, as it is one of the best I have read in terms of being well controlled and executed. However it is dated and we need to look more now at the full range of modern retail outlets. Signs of a positive shift in this direction come from studies into alternative environments such as in craft markets
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and telesales
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; both have shown that the presence of music is associated with people choosing to linger for longer.