Spring by Vivaldi is often played at weddings and now researchers believe this happy piece of classical music and others like it can help to generate creativity.
A study published in medical journal PLos ONE has found listening to 'happy' music may help generate more innovative and creative ideas.
Led by creativity expert Dr Simone Ritter in the Netherlands, researchers at the University of Technology Sydney compared the effect music had on a person's thinking.
Their investigation involved 155 participants who completed questionnaires and were divided into experimental groups to listen to one of four different classical music compositions - categorised as calm (The Swan), happy, sad (Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings) and anxious (Mars, The Bringer of War).
A control group listened to silence.
While listening to music, participants performed various cognitive tasks to test divergent and convergent creative thinking.
Divergent thinking involves producing multiple answers with unexpected combinations, recognising links among remote associates or transforming information into unexpected forms.
Convergent thinking emphasises accuracy and logic, and applies conventional search, recognition and decision-making strategies.
The researchers found that listening to the 'happy' music - which was Strings by Vivaldi - facilitated more divergent creative thinking compared to silence.
"Happy gave us an effect but the others did not when compared against silence," said co-author Dr Sam Ferguson from the Creativity and Cognition Studios located in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at UTS.
"The variables involved in the happy music condition may enhance flexibility in thinking, so that the participant can consider solutions that may not have occurred to them as readily if they were performing the task in silence," said Ferguson.
The authors suggest that their study may demonstrate that music listening could promote creative thinking in inexpensive and efficient ways in various scientific, educational and organisational settings.
"It's well understood that people use music to regulate their emotional state, so to speak, and we can also see that we have found an approach to be a bit more creative," said Dr Ferguson.
