Music and Its Effects: A Free Literature Review Example

Introduction

Background music has a calming effect that helps the mind to focus. As such, many people are fond of listening to music while carrying out tasks such as reading a book, revising for an exam, or even driving a vehicle. However, as much as multi-tasking can reduce concentration and inhibit a person’s focus, listening to music while doing other tasks seems to have a contrary effect. To some people, not having music on can be more distracting and thus reduce the concentration span. Several experiments have concluded that there are particular properties of music that the brain prefers. In their study, Maria Witek and colleagues (2014) found out that for music to yield a pleasure response, music requires to have a specific level of syncopation. Music with the right rhythms is therapeutic as it hits the middle ground between chaotic and predictable, a sweet spot that the brain highly prefers. As such, music with the right level of syncopation can help to reduce distractions and increase productivity. While it seems clear that music is a vital brain stimulator, not any background noise can help keep distractions at bay. Thus, this raises the issue of exploring the factors that make people listen to music. Therefore, a framework is required to structure the complex nature of the effects of music and develop an in-depth understanding of people's attitudes and preferences towards music.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

This research is based on the hypothesis that music has three crucial effects on people's memory improvement: reducing stress, thinking more clearly, and improving mood. Music is a useful tool in stressful situations as it provides non-invasive noise that yields pleasurable feelings. In such situations, music neutralizes the stress factors, thus offering a welcome distraction. The pleasurable sensations reduce stress by opposing any negative triggers and hence produce a sense of relaxation. People feel relaxed when music interferes and works on the nervous system of the human positively. In addition, music allows you to think more clearly because it refreshes your mind before going forward and let us focus. Also, listening to music improves your mood because you forget everything that makes u feel stressed and engage yourself with the positive words and relaxing rhythms. In addition, cheerful instrumental music has a positive effect as it lights up the heart & brain. Together, these effects and influences of music on a person's attitude provide a framework for understanding an individual's preference to listen to a particular type of music.

The paper’s outline is as follows: first, the article discusses music and its effects on stress. In today’s fast-paced world, people are faced with numerous stressful situations that can negatively affect their psychological and physical health. Music therapy can be used as an antidote to lessen anxiety and stress levels. Second, the paper examines the effects of music on attention and its impact on concentration. For all its unique abilities, the brain lacks the capacity to spend durations thinking about a particular task or thing. People's concentration spans are bound to vary depending on the nature of the task that they are carrying out. In dull situations, music helps the brain to focus and concentrate on the task at hand. Third, the article examines the effects of music on mood and performance. Music hugely impacts a person's mood – bleak music could easily drain an individual's enthusiasm for the task at hand. Music with the right syncopation has healing power, and its therapeutic nature can significantly influence our moods. Fourth, the different types of music are analyzed to assess their effect on a person’s memory development. Finally, the paper summarizes and discusses the theoretical and practical implications of music and its impact.

Music and Stress

A study by the American College Health Association (2014), estimated that almost 50% of students in the U.S. are stressed; furthermore, the association found out the stress levels negatively affected the student’s academic and personal lives. There are numerous stressors in various aspects of our daily lives. Stress can be magnified by stressors that involve multiple environmental and personal factors. Such stressors can include financial problems, health diagnoses, relationship issues, or work-related problems. Stressors have a negative impact on the physiological and psychological aspects of an individual’s everyday life. Stress can either be acute or chronic. Acute stress is short-term, usually occurring on an irregular basis, and causes no harm to the physical and psychological well-being of an individual. In contrast, chronic stress is severe, generally occurring quite regularly, and negatively impacts an individual's daily life (Pisarczyk, 2018). Chronic stress can severely impair an individual’s memory development. Physiologically, the nervous system is the primary mechanism in our body that controls our response to stress. Besides, leisure activities such as listening to music offer a therapeutic treatment that helps to reduce the adverse impacts of chronic stress. In general, leisure activities are considered as an extremely useful coping strategy that can help individuals to self-regulate their stress levels.

Despite being around for ages, it is until recently that researchers have begun to explore the therapeutic aspects of music. Also, the use of music as a therapeutic treatment is relatively novel. The extensive research on music therapy provides the basis for the use of music to relieve stress. In their study, Bland et al. (2012) found out that college students considered listening to music as the preferred coping mechanism to manage stress. From this evidence, it is evident that music positively influences an individual’s cognitive abilities, thus helping them to feel less stressed. It is clear that exposure to music has a profound impact on an individual’s physical and mental health while under stress, thus understanding the effect of music on our bodies is exceptionally noteworthy. Though music is subjective and individual’s preference vary, listening to music has been found to yield a positive effect on the brain. The rhythmic and melodic content of music taps something innately ingrained within humans, thus triggering a positive response that acts as stress relievers.

Music and Attention

Music is essential in helping us to concentrate. In analyzing the effect of music on concentration, it is imperative to consider the construct of attention. The human brain has numerous cognitive abilities, but it has not evolved to process abstract information or concentrate for longer durations on one thing. Humans seem to possess two attention systems: conscious and unconscious attention. Whereas, conscious attention enables an individual to direct their focus towards things that require urgent concentration. The unconscious attention shifts the concentration towards something that the senses may pick up to be significant (Burnett, 2016). Besides, conscious attention is highly complex and is associated more with higher reasoning. On the other hand, though the unconscious attention is simpler, it is, however, equally fundamental as it related to emotional processing. Also, the unconscious attention operates much faster than the conscious one. However, the trouble comes in because the unconscious attention rarely shuts down. Thus, when the conscious attention is concentrating on the task in hand, the unconscious attention system is wandering, scanning for anything significant in the peripheral senses. So, in case the task in hand is dull or unpleasant, conscious attention is likely to lose concentration. In this case, since the unconscious system is more potent and operates much faster, it causes more distraction diverting attention to something else. In such situations, music is instrumental as it provides non-invasive noise that yields pleasurable feelings that effectively neutralize the distracting nature of the unconscious system, thus helping us to concentrate on the essential tasks.

Music, Mood, and Performance

Music relaxes, calms, and stimulates our mood. Different genres of music stimulate different moods in a person. Major mode with loud volume, fast tempo, and high pitch is likely to stimulate happiness. Similarly, minor mode with a low pitch, low volume, slow tempo, and low pitch is expected to induce a somber mood and sadness. When listening to a fast tempo type of music, the heart variability rate decreases, thus enhancing productivity and increasing positive feelings. In contrast, listening to annoying music, an individual becomes short-tempered and less productive and hence reducing positive feelings, which induce sadness. Further evidence indicates that music has an effect on dopamine levels, which influence mood and anxiety levels (Ajmal & Khan, 2017). Music influences us in different ways since it has a substantial impact on a person's brains and emotional experiences, producing energy that unites the brain and body. As such, listening to music enhances our performance level and improves the quality of life. Besides, music influences an individual's perpetual abilities, and thus a person is less stressed while listening to background music. As mentioned above, the mood is linked to energy and tension. It is common for a person to feel positive when in serenity as there is less tension, and the energy is relaxed. However, in an anxious state, the tensions are elevated, and hence a person is prone to experience negative feelings in such an environment. As such, music plays a profound role in inducing happiness, cognitive clarity, vivacity, as well as reducing tiredness, unhappiness, and stress.

Type of Music

Though music is useful in keeping distractions at bay, not any background noise can have such an effect. Different type of music has a varying influence on individuals. From previous discussions on music and its impact, it seems evident that the kind of music is essential as well. The nature and style of music that one listens to can cause varied responses in the brain. As previously discussed, music dramatically influences our moods, and as funky music can compel one to dance, sad music can induce melancholy. In this regard, some researchers suggest that the nature of influence that music induces on an individual is highly linked to personal preferences (Burnett, 2016). Whereas listening to music that one likes to tend to increase focus, exposure to dull music is likely to impede attention and concentration. Given the varying musical preferences, exposing people to a single type of music in the workplace or classroom can obviously yield mixed results. In the workplace, the type of music is highly imperative as bleak music could diminish enthusiasm for the tasks in hand, thus impairing productivity and performance. Besides, it is worthy to note how vocalization and human speech are incorporated into musical pieces as they can have a profound effect on concentration and focus, especially in the workplace.

Conclusion

With a large number of people frequently listening to music, research on the effects of music has typically been based on stress, attention, mood, and performance. Thus, this paper has explored these effects of music to increase understanding of peoples' attitudes and perceptions towards music. The framework proposed in this paper has explored music and its impact on stress, attention, and mood. Firstly, the review shows that leisure activities such as listening to music offer a therapeutic treatment that reduces the adverse impacts of chronic stress. The extensive research on music therapy provides the basis for the use of music to relieve stress. The rhythmic and...