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

摘要： 以往关于背景音乐和创造性的研究得出了相互矛盾的结论,这可能是背景音乐的效果受到任务性质、音乐属性、播放时机和个体差异的调节。研究通过两个实验探讨了背景音乐节奏和播放时机对基于“原型启发”创造发明的影响。结果表明,慢节奏背景音乐促进了个体对原型知识的保持效果,在创造发明过程中播放快节奏背景音乐促进了科学创造发明的流畅性和灵活性,但阻碍了新颖性。在科学知识学习阶段可以通过播放慢节奏的背景音乐增强科学知识的保持效果,改善科学创造发明;而在科学创造发明过程中播放快节奏背景音乐可以改变注意模式、加工效率和信息加工模式从而提高科学创造发明的流畅性与灵活性。

关键词: 背景音乐, 播放时机, 音乐节奏, 科学创造性