MUSIC/WORKPLACE SPECIAL... ROCK ON

 ROCK ON 

How Music at the Office Affects Your Work Life

    Music is a ubiquitous accessory in nearly every office and across all careers, from a documentarian who writes scripts to the same rock’n roll album for over 15 years to a gallery curator who likes to appraise artwork while listening to Ravi Shankar’s sitar. It wasn’t always like this. Our professional lives stayed tuneless until the early 20th century, when saxophone or soft jazz started playing in elevators, and a few department stores began piping in quiet melodies to make shopping more enjoyable. In the US, in the 1940s, wireless radio companies created sets of songs for offices, which it called Stimulus Progression that slowly increased in intensity so that employees would feel energised as they worked.
If you choose to listen to personal music at your desk, you should know that it’s affecting the way you think and work in ways you may not realise. Here is an earfull:
HIDING BEHIND HEADPHONES
AS OPEN floor plans replace cubicles, music has become the favoured invisible barrier. “Companies like to promote collaboration,“ says John Goins, a human factors researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. “The flip side is that sometimes you have to block out the noise from the people collaborating around you.” If you work with someone who wears headphones constantly, you know it can be hard to get his attention. One co-worker’s preferred method is to keep inching closer to a zoned-out cubemate until she’s spotted in his peripheral vision. Waving works, but you can also throw things, pass notes etc…
KICK-START YOUR BRAIN
MUSIC TRIGGERS memories and increase our ability to recall data. If that all-time favourite but all-too familiar song is playing in the background, does it really make a difference? Scientists at Stanford University say yes. In a study done in 2007, they found that playing a Baroque symphony for participants stimulated the part of the brain associated with attention. Another study, in the Journal of American Medical Association, reports that surgeons work more accurately to music. Researchers looked at the heart rate, blood pressure, and response time of 50 male surgeons, and concluded their problem solving ability improved when they were able to pick their own soundtrack.
    ENERGY
MUSIC CAN put you to sleep. But it can raise your energy levels too. A study by Brunel University found that when people exercised to the beat of a song, they worked out harder without even realising it. This inspired music streaming services to curate playlists for specific needs, such as “taking the edge off work”. One of the popular ones, created by a firm called Songza, is called Epic Film Scores. “The collection of sweeping soundtracks is almost exclusively listened to during the workweek,” says Elias Roman, Songza’s cofounder. “If you are working on a spreadsheet or filing paperwork, you can get pretty bored,” Roman says. “But suddenly T h e L a s t o f t h e M o hic a n s theme comes on, and you feel like you are doing something important.”
GET IT FOR FREE
YOU CAN tell all about a co-worker from the artists she likes – and even more from how she listens to them. Here again, in the contemporary world, online services have taken over and are staying put. Services like Spotify, the streaming programme that helps you create and share your own playlist are popular, although mostly you’ll be dubbed an “aficionado”, or in less charitable words, “a music snob”. But surveys show that a brute majority prefer services like Pandora – which, incidentally, in a good part of the first world, is the third most common way people listen to music after AM/FM radio and traditional CDs. Source: Adapted from a Bloomberg BusinessWeek feature ET130105