Listening to music can be relaxing, but it may interfere with your ability to create, suggests a study published online Feb. 2, 2019, by Applied Cognitive Psychology. Researchers . . . found that every kind of music significantly impaired the ability to complete the creativity tasks, while silence and library noises had no effect.
The researchers speculated that listening to music disrupted verbal working memory, which is the ability to remember information to complete a task. This was true even if people found the music enjoyable or relaxing.