Whereas auditory background (e.g., rain or joyful music) interfered with memory encoding, listening to emotionally touching music improved memory and significantly increased heart rate. The results indicated that more efficient and faster recall of faces occurred under conditions of silence or when participants were listening to emotionally touching music.

Heart rate and diastolic and systolic blood pressure were measured during an explicit face study session that was followed by a memory test. listening to the sound of rain or silence was examined by administering an old/new face memory task (involving 448 unknown faces) to a group of 54 non-musician university students. To further investigate this matter, the effect of listening to music vs. Previous studies have offered contrasting evidence and it has been recently shown that listening to music negatively affected concurrent mental processing in the elderly but not in young adults. The aim of this study was to investigate how background auditory processing can affect other perceptual and cognitive processes as a function of stimulus content, style and emotional nature.

Soft emotional background music