Role of music in design and creativity
By: Nihar Joglekar
Tags: Music, Communication Design, Design, Interaction Design, Product Design

Music has been an important aspect of design for a very long time. Creativity, being one of the critical parts of design, also gets affected by music that a creative person listens to.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while”.

These are some strong words quoted by one of the greatest personalities that left a huge mark on this world, Steve Jobs.

Now, how do we connect this big and prestigious statement to music?

If you happen to visit some design studios, you will see a sight that you would have hardly seen in any other workplace, be it a small scale outsourcing firm or a multi-national organisation. Most of the employees in different design studious are plugged on to their earphones and headphones while working as if they are life-giving IVs. I happened to visit one of the design studios and spoke to some of the designers working there. When i asked them about this intense relationship they have with their headphones, they replied saying that, “music helps them in generating ideas”. Basically they all know something’s going on there and intuitively, they feel, music and sound boost their creativity.

Image by www.newscientist.com

People have this perception that work should be done in a quite and calm place with no disturbance. But in this changing modern world with inventions and innovations taking place every other day, there has to be something that motivates and encourages these people to come up with such outstanding and unique ideas. Of course, a calm workplace with no disturbance plays a vital role in this process, but people felt a need to relieve themselves from the stress created by such intense brainstorming and thinking, and the only way out was listening to music.

Dr. Jeffrey Thompson of The Center for Neuroacoustic Research in San Diego explains the impact of sound on creativity and how music can possibly change a person’s mindset and make him/her more productive by increasing their creativity.

Getting back to design, we saw how creativity gets boosted by music, now let’s see it’s effects on design. We all know the old walkmans right? The connection between designers and the music they listened to used to be relatively simple, until music transformed from these old walkmans to the new small icons on our mobile screens.

This can be considered as a boon as well as a curse for designers. Although it depends on the mentality and personality of each designer, this transition in the way of listening to music has proved to be effective with respect to multi-tasking and boosting the process of generating ideas in the field of design. At the time of walkmans, designers were somewhat confined within their boundaries because walkman can only be used for listening to music, whereas with music entering into our mobile phones, designers can do all those things which they couldn't such as doing research, communicating with other designers, sending e-mails, etc. by sitting in one place since a mobile phone allows them to do all these tasks. Music has reduced the time taken by a designer to complete the entire design process instinctively. Now let’s see how this helps in a design process..

How does a design process start?

A design process starts from picking up keywords from different mediums to form a problem statement or a “brief” as we call it. A study shows, designers who listen to music, come up with exclusive keywords that prove favorable in forming a brief.

When a lyricist writes the lyrics of a song, he/she uses a distinct process to find new ways of completing the song while keeping its structure and meaning intact. Not only the lyrics, you can see a colossal difference in the posters of songs that are released today and those which were released a decade ago. This difference portrays the transition in the way people perceived music then and how they do it now.

These two posters show the transition of mindset of the people who designed them. But how is this related to design?

Till now we just saw how listening to music helps in creativity and generating ideas for any design process, but what about seeing music? The posters shown above talk about the different design languages used while designing them. When we look at the first poster of the famous “Texas Tornados”, we get a retro and old-school feeling, because of various elements in the poster such as the hat, the fade pattern with those records, the font and the vintage background color. This can be used in a design process of designing any product or making any illustration which has a retro appeal to it. Talking about the second poster, “Twenty one Pilots”, it represents the modern era of music which has been changing for over the years. The modern font, the gradient background, their clothes, etc., all these aspects can be used while designing a monochrome and a futuristic product. Both the posters can be used in moodboards by designers while designing a poster, a product, a website or an app.