More on Words vs. Music in Audio

When I'm listening to casual audio, I often go back to my question about whether listening to words or music is better to encourage new ideas. I blogged about this a while back. It seemed (still does) that words encourage short leaps of new ideas where music encourages--or just makes feasible--big leaps to entirely new ideas. Words seem to encourage "applied ideas"--not in the sense of being utilitarian, but in the sense of limiting thoughts to new ways to apply the exact ideas in the words. It would be ridiculous to assert you can't get divergent ideas from words. It's more a practical statement. It's hard to think about two totally different topics at the same time. And when listening to words, the flow continues even as your imagination takes flight in a new direction. So you either zone out and stop listening to the audio or you get drawn back into the audio--away from your divergent pondering. So it's less that words can't stimulate great leaps in thinking than that words tend to anchor us to their specific topic. By the way, with a paper book, it's clearly different. With a book, you get a divergent idea and you pause in reading, look away from the text and, well, think. The flow of words stops until you "hit play" by looking at the text again. Obviously, audio players have a pause button, but the dynamic is different.

Meanwhile, as long as you have a seed for a new idea, music gives the idea room to develop without an anchor.

When I wonder about this, I invariably think of parents annoyed by teens spending untold hours with ears and brains plugged into their favorite tunes. Having a kid of my own, I probably could falled into the same pattern. I could have spouted self-righteously, "Any audio time not spent listening to NPR is wasted time!" But I've shifted my thinking about this. I've become convinced that the "words are the seed, music is the soil" idea is true.

So all this throws out so many questions, I'm not sure where to start. Among music without lyrics, say, jazz or new age or classical, is the effect any different? Is there anything about the music itself affecting idea development or is all instrumental music equally effective as long as our upbringing makes it attractive and familiar enough? What does this say about music that isn't pure melody? What about ballads with a clear, audible story? What about music containing lyrics and long breaks such as recordings of Chuck Berry, the Grateful Dead, or Eric Clapton? If supporting productive thinking is a goal, what's the right mix of words versus music?

My totally anecdotal experience is that, with me, ballads act just like words. That is, if a song has a strong story, such as Bruce Springsteen's My Hometown, it provides both a seed for new ideas and an anchor to divergent thinking. Now obviously, this is only because I'm one of those strange people who not only listen to words in songs, but actually find myself unable to avoid listening to them.