Rocking Rhythms or Deadly Disaster?
Perspectives on driving while listening to music
I vividly remember the day I finished driver’s education, my sixteen year-old-self delighted by the prospect of finally having the autonomy to drive a car down the road, blasting the radio with my windows rolled down. As my driver’s ed teacher took out a stack of certificates with each of my classmate’s names, certifying that we were now qualified to take our driver’s test, her voice became firm, “I want you all to know that I would be more comfortable handing you a gun than a car.” My ears perked up at the oddity of her statement, and each of my classmates looked at her, perplexed. “I know that may seem crazy to you, but everyone understands the danger associated with a gun,” she proceeded, “but most people fail to understand that a car is also extremely dangerous.”
My teacher’s provocative statement has stuck with me throughout the years, making me acutely aware of the responsibility of sitting behind a steering wheel. While twenty-first century media depicts driving as a glamorous social experience, with music blasting and friends chatting, in reality driving is a serious task charged with the responsibility of constant decision making. When the car audio was developed in the 1950s, the convergence of music and driving prompted researchers to begin dissecting a new question: does music have an impact on a driver’s performance? And if so, is it positive or negative? While historically there have been scientists on either side of this debate, one commonality between the vast majority of the researchers in the notorious studies is that they focus on music as a passive process.
Warren Brodsky noticed this and conducted two studies at Ben-Gurion University, in Beer Sheva, Israel, to research the relationship between driving and active musical engagement. Since the study was measuring active musical engagement, the participants of the study were asked to learn three popular Israeli songs, so they could familiarize themselves with the pitch, timing, and the lyrics of the song. When it came time for the experiment, the participants were more than ready for Car-aoke — they had the lyrics memorized and were ready to sing.
Now the participants’ practice was put to the test — in the first part of the experiment, they were asked to sing from memory. Without any other stimulus, like a busy street, to distract them, this served as a way for the study to gauge each of the participants’ vocal recall abilities. If your ability to copy a pitch was constantly off, you were deemed “tone deaf” and your data was not used for further analyses. Then the monitor flashed on, a traffic scene appeared, and the researchers instructed each participant on how to drive the simulated car. Each of the participants were tasked with driving in a low and high-demand condition, while simultaneously singing one of the three songs they had memorized. The low demand condition charged drivers with maneuvering through a city on a straight road, while the high demand condition required the participant to navigate through traffic while reading a map with directions. Naturally, the high demand condition required more mental energy.
While I often think of the melody of a song as being the most critical element that makes it music, recall of the songs’ lyrics fluctuated more than pitch differences between the two conditions: the first being where the participants sang from memory (the non-drive condition) and the second being the driving condition. While there was no significant change in pitch recall between the non-drive, low-demand drive, and high-demand drive conditions, there was a significant change in recollection of lyrics. The implications of this study could be used by the pro-drive-and-sing camp or the anti-drive-and-sing camp — you could argue that drivers are prioritizing their attention to the road and therefore the lyrics begin to falter or maybe your brain is overwhelmed by stimulus and your ability to sing and drive is compromised. Either way, I don’t think memorizing the lyrics to a song while driving around the busy streets of New York City is the best idea.
While singing is one activity which people tend to do while listening to music in the car, many people don’t stop there. Whether it be a conscious or subconscious habit, many people make their car into a mini band, tapping their hands on the steering wheel or moving their foot around near the break. The safety concerns with these percussive tasks are obvious — your hands and feet need to be manning the steering wheel and breaks respectively if you want to arrive at your destination safely. Since percussive drumming while listening to music in the car has become widespread, Brodsky repeated the same experiment, this time measuring how different driving conditions affected drumming sequences.
This subtly different research experiment focused on how driving impacts your perception of the beat of music, instead of the pitch and lyrics. Sensors were used to detect drumming sequences by clipping them on the steering wheel, gear shift, and the driver’s pedal. The participants went through the same conditions as in the first study: the non-driving condition where they just drummed their hands to the beat, the low-demand condition where they were asked to drive a car and drum to the beat, and the high-demand condition where they were asked to maneuver through traffic on an unknown route while drumming to the beat of the music.
Perhaps I should inform my concerned driver’s-ed teacher about this experiment’s results; the researchers found that participants drummed significantly less in the low-demand and high-demand condition compared to the non-driving condition. Maybe this is because the movement of tapping your hands to the beat directly interferes with steering your car or maybe this implies that our brain pays more attention to the road than to the beat. Interestingly, however, the study also found that when drivers were improvising the beat — as opposed to keeping a steady beat — they were most likely to make driving errors. So, beware folks, if you like to make up a beat while driving your car, you might want to think twice.
Despite all the research that we have on music and driving, we cannot conclude definitively if music is a hazard on the road or a lifesaver that’s keeping us alert. Future studies should examine if the worsened ability to sing during Car-aoke was due to neglect of one task or prioritization of the other. Regardless, the sheer awareness of the music-driving interplay should motivate each of us to be cognizant of how music impacts our own abilities to keep the roads safe. Let’s listen to my driver’s ed teacher and be aware of how every extra stimulus can interfere with our concentration on the road.
