Ansberg: Didn't use background music or noise Fodor: Was a test of a method for detecting bipolar disorder using essay writing Mednick & Mednick: (A) 50 years old (B) says nothing about music or background noise (C) says nothing about creativity Mehta, Zhu, & Cheema: used noise, not music ("we blended a combination of multi-talker noise in a cafeteria, roadside traffic, and distant construction noise to create a soundtrack of constantly varying background noise") Mikulincer & Sheffi: discussed "irrelevant background speech" and its impact on memory recall Storm, Angello, & Bjork: is about word association The basic problem is that the studies they cite for using CRATs use CRATs for cognition and problem solving, not creativity. By their definition, sudoku is "creative." So okay, we're testing problem solving not creativity. What else are we hashing up? So. This isn't "is music bad for your creativity" this is "does listening to '90s Ibiza at a conversational level impact your ability to solve word problems." I don't know that we needed to run that test, doc. If you asked me to run an experiment on the effect of music on creativity, I'd do it like this: DAY 1: Recruit test participants, get them to build a 90 minute Spotify playlist DAY 2: Give them blank sheets of paper and 30 minutes to do something "creative" while I played them their playlist on shuffle DAY 3: Give them blank sheets of paper and 30 minutes to do something "creative" in silence DAYS 4-11: Alternate Days 2 and 3 DAY 12: Take the assembled output of the subject and ask her to arrange her last 20 days' works in order of preference Crunch the numbers and see if there's a correlation between self-assessed performance and consumption of music. Full stop. No "creativity" metrics you like? Fine. Find something you can measure and quantify it. What they have here is akin to measuring bicep size and equating it to athletic performance. Sure - it touches in one or two places but pretending you've learned something by blasting someone else's music and then saying "look! They're distracted!" doesn't improve the world's knowledge one iota.In the present paper, we critically examine the claim that background music enhances creativity by employing variants of widely used verbal problem solving tasks that are typically used to study creativity (Ansburg, 2000; Fodor, 1999; Mednick & Mednick, 1967; Mehta, Zhu, & Cheema, 2012; Mikulincer & Sheffi, 2000; Storm, Angello, & Bjork, 2011)
As we have noted, our present research used CRATs as a measure of insight‐based creative problem solving (Bowden & Jung‐Beeman, 1998). A CRAT involves a participant being shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, and flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case “sun”) that can be combined with each presented word (either being placed before it or after it) to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial, and sunflower in the present example)
The music was played via Sennheiser HD‐202 headphones at approximately 65–70 dB(A). The music was a 30‐s segment of a Spanish translation of a 1990s UK chart pop song played via E‐Prime Software that contained clearly discernable lyrics and accompanying instruments.