Effect of musical stimuli on design thinking: Differences between expert and student designers

Neuroscientific studies on the influence of musical stimulation have increased recently; however, whether music is associated with changes in the design thinking of designers remains unclear. In this study, 10 expert and 10 student designers were invited to participate in an electroencephalography experiment to examine how musical stimuli affect designers during design thinking. Four musical genre tasks were used to distinguish the effects on the brain activations of designers with different levels of expertise. During the experiment, designers were requested to silently respond to the questions: "What aspect of this music can you use in the project just mentioned?" and "How would you incorporate these aspects into this project?" We found that (i) in both country-folk and classical music tasks, the left prefrontal and right temporal regions of the expert designers were more activated than those of the student designers; (ii) in the rock and roll task, the right temporal region of the experts was more activated than that of the students, whereas the middle prefrontal region of the students was more activated than that of the experts; and (iii) the middle parieto-occipital, left temporal, and right temporal regions of the experts were more activated than those of the students during the soul music task. In conclusion, the brain activations of designers mainly increased in the middle frontoparietal and right temporal regions during the musical stimulation tasks. Different musical genres could result in different effects on designers' thinking.