Facing the Music: Performance Implications of Working with Music in the Background

Multitasking is a subfield of Human-Computer Interaction that addresses people performing multiple tasks on one or more devices. While there is a significant body of work on interleaved multitasking, where people start a task, switch to a different task, and then continue the original task, few studies have examined parallel multitasking, where two or more tasks are happening at the same time, on a single device. Listening to music while working on a computer or mobile-based task falls into this latter category. Music is more prevalent in our society at this point than at any other point in history. People now have the ability to stream music from their mobile devices while performing any task. Gathering a deeper understanding of how music affects performance on different tasks will help further our understanding of parallel multitasking. In order to examine how music impacts performance we created an Android application where participants perform five different types of cognitive tasks on a mobile device: mental arithmetic, memory, reading comprehension, concentration, and spatial abilities. Participants were divided into three conditions: music with lyrics, music without lyrics (instrumental music) and no music. We found that, except for spatial tasks where music helped performance, generally music had a negative impact on performance in our modules. This implies that listening to music while completing tasks is another form of multitasking and can lead to negative results.