Surveying Literature: The effects of music choice on task performance (Gianna Cassidy and Raymond Macdonald)

I took a break for a bit today from Aaron Marks' Game Audio to dip into something else and read Gianna Cassidy and Raymond Macdonald's "The effects of music choice on task performance: A study on the impact of self-selected and experimenter-selected music on driving game performance and experience."

Much as the title suggests, the article basically details the process and results from an audio experiment that tested how accurately and quickly the study participants were able to complete three laps on a game course.  They had choices to hear as they drove: silence, car sound effects, or car sounds with: music the participant selected, "high arousal" music, or "low arousal" music selected by the study designers.  Unsurprisingly, the study participants enjoyed the game the most when they were listening to music of their choice that they had brought to the study.  What did surprise me was, in this study at least, that performance improved when participants played the game listening to music of their own choice.  Conversely, they did the worst (drove faster and made more mistakes) when the listened to "high arousal" music.

I really had two main thoughts as I read:

1- clearly music can affect player performance in a game.  While this study focused on a driving game, at some level, it should apply to other genres as well: platform games, strategy games, RPGs, etc...  By extension, this makes the selection of game composer and game soundtrack incredibly important.  The game audio could determine whether or not the player is successful in a game and whether or not they finish a game, really get drawn in to the series, etc.  Any other research on this would be incredibly interesting.

2- As they ask at the end of the article, could certain kinds of music improve driving in the real world.  More research into this area could actually improve driving, safety, and help keep people alive.  This definitely warrants more investigation, though I doubt people will ever want to be forced to listen to a certain soundtrack in their cars.  It seems from the study, though, that music of the driver's choice could be the most helpful for driving accuracy of all, although a close second might be no music, with just the sound of the car on the road.

This made me wonder: what would I listen to as driving music if called to be in a game study?  I'm sure my selection would change depending on the day, but today was thinking that Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians would get me focused and in the zone for a driving game experiment.