Effects of Adaptive Sound Level Changes of Background Music on Cognitive Tasks

In some cases, people can concentrate on their work with listening to the background music while there are also cases in which the background music gets in the way of their work. There are many studies on the relationship between music and concentration but the sound level of music was fixed during the experimental task in the previous studies. We focus on the effects of adaptive changes in the sound level of background music on the cognitive task. In our experiment, the sound level is lowered when the cognitive load of the task is high in order to reduce the interference of music to the task. We used N-back task as the cognitive task. The experimental results showed that the participants felt more relaxed when listening to music at a higher sound level during the task with a lower cognitive load. However, the changes in the sound level according to the level of cognitive load had no significant effect on the number of correct answers and the time to answer.