Influence of Background Music on Freehand Drawing

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study that explores the effects of background music on freehand drawing. In the experiment, two types of background music and two themes for freehand drawing were prepared. To control the consistency of these materials, we used a 2 (background music: dark vs. cheerful) x 2 (themes: dark vs. cheerful) mixed factorial design. In the experiment, the participants (n = 20) drew sketches for each theme while the background music was streamed. These results showed that the theme had a strong influence on the impressions for the sketches, while the background music had an effect on the amount of freehand drawing. These results suggests two distinctive types of creative mining for the explicit and implicit creative processes.