关键词: 背景音乐, 播放时机, 音乐节奏, 科学创造性

Abstract: Creativity is a crucial skill for twenty-first-century individuals and contributes to personal achievement and social development. With the ubiquitous availability of portable devices and music, it is prevalent for university students to listen to music while learning, even viewing video lectures, and doing other types of cognitive tasks. Background music can help them concentrate on tasks, relieve boredom, and regulate their mood. Although listening to music has become fully embedded in learning and creativity, the effects of background music on learning from video lectures and scientific creativity are not well established.
According to the arousal and mood hypothesis, background music benefits learning by enhancing individuals’ arousal and regulating their mood. Additionally, the impacts of background music on arousal and mood are considerably moderated by the tempo (fast vs. slow). Generally, fast background music often increases individuals’ arousal and induces pleasantness, whereas slow music usually decreases their arousal level and induces unpleasantness. According to the Cognitive Load Theory, individuals’ cognitive resources are limited, and they can only process limited information at any moment. Listening to music while learning and creating inevitably consumes finite cognitive resources and brings an extra cognitive load. As slow music needs more time to be presented, individuals experience more resources to process slow music and have a higher cognitive load than fast music.
Based on the above theoretical considerations, it is reasonable to claim that when individuals’ cognitive load induced by slow music surpasses some critical threshold, their learning performance and creativity are impaired. We conducted two experiments to address the various effects of background music on arousal, learning performance, and creativity (i.e., frequency, flexibility, and originality). The goal of Experiment 1 was to test the effect of the tempo of background music (fast vs. low vs. non-music) during viewing video lectures. The slow music condition showed better learning performance, followed by the fast music condition, and then the non-music condition. Regarding creativity, the fast music condition showed higher fluency followed by the non-music condition and the slow music condition. The fast music condition showed higher flexibility than the slow music condition; the fast music condition showed higher originality than the slow and non-music conditions.
The goal of Experiment 2 was to test the effect of playing timing of background music (before viewing video lectures vs. during viewing video lectures vs. during creativity tasks). The condition listening to music during creativity tasks had a higher cognitive load, lower learning performance, and higher fluency and flexibility of scientific creativity. In addition, the condition of listening to music during creativity tasks had lower originality of scientific creativity.
In summary, the above results suggested that background music did not significantly influence individuals’ arousal, but the slow background music facilitated individuals’ learning performance, and the fast background music facilitated individuals’ fluency and flexibility, especially when listening to music during scientific creativity.

Key words: background music, timing, the tempo, scientific creativity