3 Nov, 2014
Is music important at work? — Sydney Morning Herald
“I need the radio, bloody right, I couldn’t face this place without it.”
The place referred to in that sentence is a workplace and the owner of the sentiment is an employee. It’s an opinion shared by others, too, such as his colleague who remarked: “You’ve got to have it to keep alive.”
Those potent thoughts were collected as part of a study published three years ago in the Poetics academic journal. The professor wanted to find out whether playing music at work had an impact on people. So he went to a blind-making factory and worked there full-time for a number of months – just like a normal employee – observing how his peers reacted when the music came on.
As you can imagine, a factory floor necessitates the use of manual labour. It’s dull and repetitive work, turning workers into robots. The music, unsurprisingly, was a reprieve from the mundane. Without it, the workplace was perceived as “deathly” and “awful”.
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