Speeding up the tempo of background sounds accelerates the pace of behavior

Abstract

Hearing fast-tempo music in the background is shown to affect the pace of motor behavior. However, the mechanism underlying this phenomenon remains unclear. We investigated how tempo influences behavioral pace in a simple perceptual-motor task in which participants heard background sound sequences (30, 60, 120, 180, and 240 bpm) while performing a line-tracing task. The order of the tempo conditions (ascending vs. descending series of tempo) was manipulated. When sound sequences changed from slower to faster tempi (that is, ascending series), behavioral pace accelerated. However, the pace did not change in the descending series. The subjective arousal level increased under faster tempo sounds regardless of tempo series. The results indicated that the ongoing tempo of background sounds did not determine the behavioral pace directly through increased arousal or perceptual-motor synchronization. Not only the ongoing tempo but also the preceding tempo of background sounds is shown to be an important factor for behavioral pace change.

An Experimental Study on the Influence of Soundscapes on People’s Behaviour in an Open Public Space

“…Focusing more on the effect of music tempo, Kampfe, Sedlmeier, and Renkewitz [7] asserted that hearing background music characterized by a fast tempo leads to an increase in the pace of certain behaviours, such as drawing, reading, walking and running, and eating and drinking. In general, there are two fundamental hypotheses for these effects; the first is the synchronization of the movements to the musical beat, while the second is the increase in the arousal found with fast-tempo music [8].…”

Pace, Emotion, and Language Tonality on Speech-to-song Illusion

“…The cognitive effect of fast-tempo music is different from the effect of slow-tempo music. For example, fast-tempo background music, in comparison to playing slow-tempo background music in an advertisement, was found to distract a person's cognitive resources from processing the content of the advertisement, thereby lowering the content recall rate [14].…”

“…In defining the pace of a piece of music, previous research mostly classified slow-tempo music as having a pace below 120 BPM (beats per minute) and fast tempo music as having a pace above 120 BPM [14][15][16][17].…”

“…speed of walking) and memory (i.e. content recall rate) [14][15][16][17] as well as the speech rate could affect people's speech perception [18][19][20][21][22]24], particularly in the recognition of words, no existing study has ever tested the effect of pace on the auditory illusory transformation. This study is a pioneering study to investigate the effect of pace in affecting the perception of the STS illusion.…”

“…From Oakes and North (2006)'s experimental study, people had a lower recall rate of the advertisement information when fast-tempo background music was played [14]. This is because music in a faster pace distracted the person from information processing.…”