How Music Affects Your Mood
Imagine one day you woke up and decided you wanted some new jeans. You venture to the mall in a pretty neutral mood. You pull up to your local American Eagle, arriving upon piles of jeans lining the tables in front of you. As you peruse through the jeans, you’re unable to find the exact type of jeans you’re looking for, so you decide to come back another day. Fast forward to five days later, you wake up and decide you’re going to try buying jeans again. You arrive at American Eagle with the same piles of jeans welcoming you back with open arms. As you browse through the store, your favorite song begins to play. You start to vibe and swing your head slightly to the song. As you’re navigating your way through the store, you find the exact type of jeans you’re looking for! You go to the checkout counter and leave delighted with your new pair of jeans in your hand.
In the scenario above, the only difference between the two days in American Eagle was your favorite song playing. Was this the reason that you were able to find the jeans you were looking for — or was it simply your lucky day? If I had to guess, I’d say the music caused you to stay in the store longer, which allowed you to find the type of jeans you were looking for. More and more store owners are using specific music, smells, and lighting to stimulate their buyers to stay longer in their store, eventually leading to a purchase. These store owners state that sometimes the atmosphere is more influential than the product itself when a purchase is made. Different characteristics of music influence the customer experience in stores. Interestingly, when music is played loudly, shoppers tend to spend less time in a store compared to when music is played softly. Swedish blogger Anne Lise Stranden, describing research on music in shopping contexts, states that this may be because loud music prevents people from listening to their own thoughts, confusing the buyer and leading them to simply venture into another store with more calm music where they can peacefully peruse. Music volume, however, did not affect the number of purchases a customer made, it solely affected the amount of time a customer spent in the store. The tempo of the music is also a significant factor for store owners. In Ronald E. Milliman’s landmark 1982 paper, Milliman found that the tempo of background music can affect the pace of customer traffic within the store, along with the sales volume. Fast music (uptempo) tends to make customers move through the store faster, and therefore buy fewer items, whereas slow music (downtempo) has the exact opposite effect.
Background music not only affects the customer experience, but can also affect perceptions, actions, judgments, and emotional experiences in various everyday contexts. Music is an effective tool for emotional communication, by expressing emotions sensed by listeners or by generating sentiments within listeners. A study conducted by Janzen & colleagues evaluates how background music can affect a person’s judgment about the artwork they look at in a natural setting. The artwork chosen for this study was a modern abstract oil on canvas painting called Clear Composition, 1942 by Kandinsky. I personally absolutely fell in love with this painting when I first saw it, but I mean, who wouldn’t?! Just take a look:
This painting was specifically chosen because there are a lot of abstract shapes that lack meaning; this was done on purpose so that no shapes were automatically correlated with a specific emotion. The background music the researchers chose were all one-minute passages of instrumental music taken from Richard Wagner’s opera compositions, varying in valence (otherwise known as how positive the music sounds); happy music would mean it has a positive valence, whereas sad music would mean it has a negative valence. Four emotional categories were chosen for the background music in the study: happy, scary, peaceful, and sad. Each audio file was repeated for approximately 20 minutes so that the participants would be able to view the painting and have continuous background music playing (I don’t know about the participants, but if I had to listen to a one-minute audio file that was repeated for 20 minutes, I’d be pretty bored…). In the control condition, participants listened to 40 seconds of spoken instructions with no overlapping musical track. In the experimental condition, participants listened to the spoken instructions and music through headphones. The loudness of the music was kept at approximately 70 dB, about as loud as a washing machine or dishwasher; the baseline environment loudness was about 50 dB. After completing the task, participants answered a questionnaire regarding the aesthetic experience of the artwork where they rated the valence of the music on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not at all/ very negative/ very calm) to 5 (a lot/ very positive/ very intense). On average participants observed the painting for three minutes and took twenty-five minutes to complete the questionnaires. Isn’t that crazy?! Participants took more than eight times longer to complete the questionnaire than actually observe the painting; either the questionnaire was hard, or the music really stimulated the minds of these participants.
Contrast analyses revealed significant differences in valence ratings between silence and happy music (with higher ratings for groups listening to happy music than silence) as well as between silence and peaceful music (indicated by the graph below). These results suggest that participants who listened to music categorized as happy or peaceful rated the valence of the artwork significantly more positively than participants who appreciated the painting with no background music. Overall, Janzen & colleagues found that music positivity significantly affected participants’ judgment of the amiability of the painting. Music likability also had a significant effect on participants’ judgments of the artwork’s valence. Specifically, participants who liked the background music rated these dimensions of the artwork’s aesthetic experience significantly more positively than those who disliked the music. Altogether, these results suggest that aspects associated with the aesthetic experience of music may influence the aesthetic experience of visual art as well, opening new avenues for the exploration of cognitive operations underlying the aesthetic experience generated by objects.
Music is a medium through which people convey all kinds of emotions. Who would’ve thought that background music could affect your buying decisions or how much you like a painting? Music permeates our lives, but as we can see, it also deeply permeates our brains. It has the power to influence what a person’s next moves are; so beware, next time you enter a jeans store, make sure you’re wearing noise-canceling headphones so you can make a music-free neutral decision.
References
Ali, H., & Ngo, C. (2022a). https://www.shpa.org.au/publications-resources/journals/grit/doi#1351. Pharmacy Growth, Research, Innovation and Training, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.24080/grit.1355
Ali, H., & Ngo, C. (2022b). https://www.shpa.org.au/publications-resources/journals/grit/doi#1351. Pharmacy Growth, Research, Innovation and Training, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.24080/grit.1355
Janzen, T. B., de Oliveira, B., Ventorim Ferreira, G., Sato, J. R., Feitosa-Santana, C., & Vanzella, P. (2022). The effect of background music on the aesthetic experience of a visual artwork in a naturalistic environment. Psychology of Music, 030573562210798. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221079866
Devaney, E. (2021, May 19). Stores Are Using Music to Make You Spend More -ThinkGrowth.org. Medium. https://thinkgrowth.org/stores-are-using-music-to-make-you-spend-more-d6c85974b20b
Milliman, R. E. (1982). Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298204600313
Stranden, A. L. (2017, January 12). Loud music confuses shoppers. ScienceNordic. https://sciencenordic.com/forskningno-marketing-society--culture/loud-music-confuses-shoppers/1441641
Wikipedia contributors. (2022, May 8). Richard Wagner. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner
