“We found that the ability so solve problem was significantly impaired if participants had background music in their headphones,” says John Marsh, researcher in environmental psychology at University of Gävle.
“Regardless if the music made the participants feel good, if they liked the music or if they regularly listened to music while studying, music impaired their creative performance.”
However, researchers could not determine any difference in performance when they compared performance in a silent environment to that in a library.
“This could be explained by the fact the background noise in a library is stable and doesn’t change, and this means that it doesn’t become very disruptive,” John Marsh says.
Scientific article