Discuss this statement, illustrating your points with specific examples.

The intention of this essay is to prove or refute the statement that “The use of music enhances the working environment of the IT professional”. There are two main questions that will need to be addressed in order to determine the validity of this statement.

§ Can the effectual use of music in the workplace be described as a positive enforcement of a relaxing, productive and harmonious working environment, or rather, in contrast, does it produce negative effects, for example, to aggravate, annoy and distract?

§ What are the advantages and disadvantages of introducing music into the workplace?

Music has been shown in the past to help maintain a high productive workforce which is what every employer and employee endeavours to uphold. However, as past studies have generalized the findings regarding music in the workplace (a necessary procedure for scientific research), a clear understanding has not been realised as to whether music helps ALL employees to concentrate. A piece of music may be helping nine out of ten employees work, but that is to say that the other one e

The principle that music can be a means to help employees concentrate, or be a distraction can be applied to students and schoolwork. The way in which a student chooses to work could determine how well they do in school. Research has been done on students regarding this principle. In 1988 Martin found that subjects' test scores increased slightly in the presence of instrumental background music than with lyrical music or no music. Kiger did a similar study in 1989. He found that students scored highest on comprehension exams with low information load music (soft with a slow tempo, repetitive rhythm, and no lyrics) than with high information load music (non-repetitive, quick, upbeat lyrics) or no music. This is contradictory to Fox and Embrey’s findings in 1972. They concluded that the music should be “lively and upbeat”. There are many factors that this difference in opinion could be due to. It could be due to the different periods of time, nearly 20 years apart, or maybe it is due to the age gap between the students and the workers, or maybe it is simply because different people like different types of music.

In 1972 Fox and Embrey conducted four experiments to determine whether efficiency in completing tasks was affected by background music, or a lack of. These experiments were conducted on employees working on an assembly line, however their findings can be adapted to almost any line of work. The four experiments were based around the workers completing certain tasks in a specified amount of time, with different styles of music being played in the background. Their findings suggested that music can improve efficiency in repetitive tasks. They also concluded that any music that is played should be “lively and upbeat”, and the length and scheduling of the music is important. That is that some of the experiments involved the music being played in intervals rather than continuously. This gave results that suggested that this was the best way to improve the efficiency.

There are, however, some disadvantages to playing music in the workplace. One disadvantage is the cost to buy a license to do so. As music is copyrighted, a license would have to be bought to play the employers’ choice of music. Buying this license means that the employer can play the spec

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