Effect of Background Music for Attentive Concentration in Working

Abstract

Purpose: Recently, many young people have preferred to work in café than traditional library because the café is equipped with coffee, music, and cozy seats. When working in the café, whether listeners’ attentive concentration could be affected by a kind of the background music needs to be investigated as the purpose of the present study. We also aimed to confirm the attentive concentration of listeners might be caused by their music inclination.Methods: A total of ninety young adults was randomly assigned as five kinds of background music [e.g., rhythm and blues (R&B)/ballad, dance/rock, classic/jazz, fast beats, slow beats] and no music after responding to simple questions to ask their preference of music genre. While listening to the music, the subjects took an attentive concentration test, namely Frankfurter aufmerksamkeits-inventar (FAIR). The obtained data were analyzed by three subcategories of the FAIR test which consists of performance, quality, and continuity.Results: For the music genre, classic/jazz showed significantly higher continuity scores than R&B/ballad, fast beats, and no music, which means that classic/jazz music of the café could help the workers maintain the attention. In the subgroup who listened to preferred music genre, their performance scores (i.e., selective attention) was significantly higher than that of the participants who being exposed to non-preferred music.Conclusion: Current results supports that music genre and individual music inclination may partially affect listener’s ability of the attentive concentration when background music was presented in the café, although a further study to find certain possible causal factors with objective methods should be followed.