For many of us, our commute and workday has a personal soundtrack, since we don’t leave home without smartphones and headphones. A welcome diversion from the tedium of public transit, crowded sidewalks, conversation-filled cafes, or the background conundrum of many workplaces — personal playlists add calmness, inspiration, and a bit of joy to the daily grind.
Music, memory and productivity
Beyond these escapist effects however, the music you choose as part of your digital day can do double duty as a memory booster. New research from the University of Washington’s psychology department examined the power of music as mnemonic device. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Professor Henry L. Roediger III (a specialist in the study of memory retrieval) demonstrated that a song’s rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration can act as keys to unlock information stored deep in the brain. Music cues our memory, Roediger concluded, making it easier to recall information set to song.
Of course Prof Roediger isn’t the first psychologist to argue that music affects the brain, or to connect the dots between music and improved cognitive function — especially at times when we are performing routine and relatively simple cognitive tasks. Over fifty years of cross-disciplinary research has approached the music and memory association from various angles, with many (though not all) studies finding that office workers exhibit significant improvements in performance when listening to songs they enjoy via headphones.
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This may be because, as music therapy researchers at the University of Miami found, tuning in to music we like improves our mood and helps us to accomplish work tasks more quickly, to stay focused on the task at hand, and even to come up with better ideas.
Workflows: music in the stream
Dr. Roediger’s study is a timely reminder of the listening-learning link, especially considering the many emergent digital music options for connected workstations. If it’s easier to be creative and to remember information when it’s associated with a melody, you might be interested in keeping playlists fresh with free and subscription-based streaming Internet music services. If so, you’re not alone. As reported by Rolling Stone, the massive and skyrocketing popularity of streaming music services led to a decline in digital music sales in 2013 — for the first time since the opening of iTunes in 2003.
In Canada, our web radio options are much more limited than in the US marketplace, but some top choices available here include SiriusXM Canada (paid), CBC Music (free), and Rdio (free/paid). For music discovery and creating personal streaming playlists, Last.fm and SoundCloud are also good options.
To find background music that won’t distract from, but instead perfectly suits your working style, browse the playlists curated by music mavens at Sonzga. Customized according to activity, you’ll find a selection of tunes for concentrating, commuting, working out, doing housework, even sleeping. This free streaming service and social network launched in 2012, and today Songza has over 2.7 million Canadian members. Listeners are busy voting playlists up and down, and making music choices to match their mood, to suit the time of day, and in sync with the task at hand.
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