If you want your guests to be particularly sociable at an upcoming party, play music they probably haven鈥檛 heard before.
at the University of Memphis in Tennessee and her colleague at Indiana University Bloomington wanted to understand how background music affects how we follow conversations.
The team analysed the brain activity of 31 people, aged between 21 and 33, as they listened to 72 minutes of an audiobook, which the researchers used as proxy for focusing on someone talking. Background music played alongside the audiobook most of the time.
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For around half of the experiment, the participants were asked to focus on 2-minute segments of an audiobook, The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster, which was unfamiliar to them and was read by a man.
The rest of the time, they were told to focus on four background songs, which were similarly played for 2 minutes at a time. All the songs were recorded by women and included the popular Run the World (Girls) by Beyonc茅 and Stronger (What Doesn鈥檛 Kill You) by Kelly Clarkson. The other songs, Joan of Arc on the Dance Floor by Aly & AJ and OMG What鈥檚 Happening by Ava Max, were less familiar to the participants, says Brown.
The team chose an audiobook read by a man and songs sung by women because it is easier to shift your focus between two distinctly different voices, says Brown.
During the experiment, the participants wore electroencephalograms to monitor the electrical activity in their brains. This allowed the researchers to decipher how efficiently they could focus on either the audiobook or the music when asked to do so, finding that the participants could better turn their attention to the audiobook if the background music was unfamiliar to them.
After this task, the participants completed a music perception survey, which assesses musical skills, such as the ability to spot whether a pair of similar-sounding melodies are in fact the same.
The researchers found that those who scored worse on the musical perception test were markedly slower at shifting their attention between the songs and audiobook. This effect wasn鈥檛 seen as strongly in those who scored higher in the musicality test.
鈥淟ess musical listeners may be more distracted by background music or have poorer attentional allocation skills,鈥� says Bidelman.
bioRxiv
Article amended on 4 December 2023
This article has been changed to correct Gavin Bidelman鈥檚 university affiliation
