There is a prevalent opinion among a lot of young professionals that music is entertaining, relaxing, and therefore a good thing to have in the workplace. Many of them would like to have piped music in their offices.

We don't think this is a good idea for a software products company. To explain why, here is a page from that classic, "Peopleware", by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, which is to be found in the office library. This is from page 78, Chapter 12. Like the rest of the book, this piece is addressed to the software team manager, and shares some fundamental insights with him about how he can help his own team members perform:

In response to workers' gripes about noise, you can either treat the symptom or treat the cause. Treating the cause means choosing isolation in the form of noise barriers -- walls and doors -- and these cost money. Treating the symptom is much cheaper. When you install Muzak or some other form of pink noise, the disruptive noise is drowned out at small expense. You can save even more money by ignoring the problem altogether so that people have to resort to tape recorders and earphones to protect themselves from the noise. If you take either of these approaches, you should expect to incur an invisible penalty in one aspect of workers' performance: They will be less creative.

During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while they worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical selection. Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming problem to work out from specification. To no one's surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by music -- there's another brain centre that listens to the music.

The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild card. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realised this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.

Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing centre of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it's the brain's holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centred in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say "Ahah!" and steers you toward and ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work. The creative leap involves right brain function. If the right brain is busy listening to 1001 Strings on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost.

The creative penalty exacted by the environment is insidious. Since creativity is a sometime thing anyway, we often don't notice when there's less of it. People don't have a quota for creative thoughts. The effect of reduced creativity is cumulative over a long period. The organisation is less effective, people grind out the work without a spark of excitement, and the best people leave.

This is why we discourage our engineers from listening to music while working. We do not believe music and good hands-on software development or debugging can mix. General services and accounting clerks can have music while they work, but systems troubleshooting or software development professionals should not get their iPods or Walkmans to office, or make any other arrangements for music at their desks.