Does cubing while listening to music make you slower?

[cuberbutnotacuber]

I had this question pop up into my mind a few minutes ago, so I decided to post a thread containing my research and observations. I found a great video by TNL Cubing on this topic, but I wanted to find out for myself. I also want to find out which genre is the best. These include:

-Pop
-Hip Hop
-Rock
-Lofi
-Electronic
-Blues
-EDM
-Bollywood Music (not genre, but I want to see how it can affect solve times. Technically, it can be classified as Dance music, but it's different enough that I still want to see)


Experiment below (breaking it up into parts, can't finish it in one day) :

Music and Cubing: Trial I
Day I

Materials:
- MoYu RS3M (2020)
- QiYi Timer
- Mat
- Spotify Account
- Headphones
- Laptop
- CubeDesk (for scramble)

In order to conduct this, I will be using one algorithim to warm up on each day, and 3 different scrambles for 3 solves. I will be doing 3 solves with each genre. I will also be doing a control experiment with no music to see how my times stack up against it. On Day I, I will be focusing on the following genre: Pop.

Hypothesis:
Music will affect your solve times in a negative way, causing distractions and preventing you from performing at your maximum potential.

Experiment:

Solve type 1:

Scramble 1: U F2 L2 B2 D2 F2 D L2 F2 L2 D B2 R' F' R2 D2 B' R' F L' F
Solve: 21.95 seconds.

Scramble 2: D R F B U' R2 D F2 L D2 L2 B L2 U2 B' R2 L2 F2 R2 L2
Solve: 24.51 seconds

Scramble 3: F2 U2 L2 R2 D' R2 U F2 D2 F2 D2 L2 B' D' U F U L R' D' F2 U'
Solve: 22.28 seconds

Average: 22.913

Solve type 2 (Pop):

For this genre, I will be listening to:

-Heat Waves (Shakur Ahmad Remix)
-Blinding Lights
-Take My Breath

Spoiler: +

Great songs btw, you should listen to them

Scramble 1: U F2 L2 B2 D2 F2 D L2 F2 L2 D B2 R' F' R2 D2 B' R' F L' F
Solve: 21.05 Seconds

Scramble 2: D R F B U' R2 D F2 L D2 L2 B L2 U2 B' R2 L2 F2 R2 L2
Solve: 19.44 seconds

Scramble 3: F2 U2 L2 R2 D' R2 U F2 D2 F2 D2 L2 B' D' U F U L R' D' F2 U'
Solve: 21.98

Average: 20.823 seconds

Day I: Results

Solve type 1: No Music
Ao3: 22.913

Solve type 2: Pop
Ao3: 20.823

Result:

Listening to these three specific songs made my solve times faster. We will have to wait and see for the overall results. One thing I could have improved on in day 1 was the randomization of songs. I asked siri to choose 3 numbers, and I played the songs which came up accordingly. Next time I might set specific number parameters. Overall, I was faster by 2.09 seconds while listening to music today.

 

[cuberswoop]

I had this question pop up into my mind a few minutes ago, so I decided to post a thread containing my research and observations. I found a great video by TNL Cubing on this topic, but I wanted to find out for myself. I also want to find out which genre is the best. These include:

-Pop
-Hip Hop
-Rock
-Lofi
-Electronic
-Blues
-EDM
-Bollywood Music (not genre, but I want to see how it can affect solve times. Technically, it can be classified as Dance music, but it's different enough that I still want to see)


Experiment below (breaking it up into parts, can't finish it in one day) :

Music and Cubing: Trial I
Day I

Materials:
- MoYu RS3M (2020)
- QiYi Timer
- Mat
- Spotify Account
- Headphones
- Laptop
- CubeDesk (for scramble)

In order to conduct this, I will be using one algorithim to warm up on each day, and 3 different scrambles for 3 solves. I will be doing 3 solves with each genre. I will also be doing a control experiment with no music to see how my times stack up against it. On Day I, I will be focusing on the following genre: Pop.

Hypothesis:
Music will affect your solve times in a negative way, causing distractions and preventing you from performing at your maximum potential.

Experiment:

Solve type 1:

Scramble 1: U F2 L2 B2 D2 F2 D L2 F2 L2 D B2 R' F' R2 D2 B' R' F L' F
Solve: 21.95 seconds.

Scramble 2: D R F B U' R2 D F2 L D2 L2 B L2 U2 B' R2 L2 F2 R2 L2
Solve: 24.51 seconds

Scramble 3: F2 U2 L2 R2 D' R2 U F2 D2 F2 D2 L2 B' D' U F U L R' D' F2 U'
Solve: 22.28 seconds

Average: 22.913

Solve type 2 (Pop):

For this genre, I will be listening to:

-Heat Waves (Shakur Ahmad Remix)
-Blinding Lights
-Take My Breath

Spoiler: +

Great songs btw, you should listen to them

Scramble 1: U F2 L2 B2 D2 F2 D L2 F2 L2 D B2 R' F' R2 D2 B' R' F L' F
Solve: 21.05 Seconds

Scramble 2: D R F B U' R2 D F2 L D2 L2 B L2 U2 B' R2 L2 F2 R2 L2
Solve: 19.44 seconds

Scramble 3: F2 U2 L2 R2 D' R2 U F2 D2 F2 D2 L2 B' D' U F U L R' D' F2 U'
Solve: 21.98

Average: 20.823 seconds

Day I: Results

Solve type 1: No Music
Ao3: 22.913

Solve type 2: Pop
Ao3: 20.823

Result:

Listening to these three specific songs made my solve times faster. We will have to wait and see for the overall results. One thing I could have improved on in day 1 was the randomization of songs. I asked siri to choose 3 numbers, and I played the songs which came up accordingly. Next time I might set specific time parameters. Overall, I was faster by 2.09 seconds while listening to music today.

Trust me, lofi will make you speeeeeeed.

 

[cuberbutnotacuber]

Trust me, lofi will make you speeeeeeed.

I am a bit biased towards pop because its my favorite genre of music. That may affect my solve times as well. Who knows? We'll find out.

 

[xyzzy]

In order to conduct this, I will be using one algorithim to warm up on each day, and 3 different scrambles for 3 solves. I will be doing 3 solves with each genre. I will also be doing a control experiment with no music to see how my times stack up against it.

Your experiment is way underpowered to detect any effect listening to music would have.

How much variation do you get in solves within a single session? How much variation do you get in solves across sessions? For most people averaging 20-25 seconds, the non-music-related sources of variation can easily contribute 2 or more seconds. (A more precise way of thinking about this is to look at the standard deviations of your times.) That makes it almost impossible to tease out music-related variations that are smaller than that from looking at the mean of three solves. Is a difference of 2 seconds (like you had) really caused by the music, or was it just natural variation?

As a (very rough) rule of thumb, if you think your non-music-related sources of variation is x times larger than your music-related sources of variation, you'll need to average over at least x^2 samples in order to properly test the hypothesis. For me at least, I'd estimate x to be around 10-15, so if I were to do this experiment, I'd make sure to do at least 200 solves per music genre. (Note: this is assuming you're measuring variation in the same unit as your times, like when calculating standard deviation; if you're using variance, which has the unit s^2, then x times more variance means x times more samples needed.)

Furthermore, you're reusing scrambles between the with-music solves and the no-music solves. I get why you might want to do that (so that the scrambles are without-a-doubt equally difficult), but on the second time you're doing the same scramble, you already have a rough idea of how it's going to play out. This won't be an issue if you use large averages, which would also solve the previous problem.

edit:

Pontificating more on experiment design: even using larger averages is a bad idea, now that I think more about it. If you do an ao200 for each music genre, you'd end up having done well over a thousand solves over the course of the experiment. You could very well have your global average improve just from doing that many solves! That would make it impossible to compare solves done near the start of the experiment versus solves done near the end.

Probably the truly ideal experiment design would be to get a huge playlist of songs across your chosen genres, include some dummy silence tracks as a control, shuffle them (*), then just keep doing solves (of random scrambles; don't reuse scrambles) and analyse the results after you've gone through the whole playlist. Match up the individual solve results with the song genres (**), then compare the averages as sorted by music genre.

* Most music apps don't uniformly randomise songs, because that doesn't make for a good listening experience (for normal people who aren't doing music experiments). You'd probably want to shuffle your playlist separately from whatever your music app of choice is.

** You absolutely have to keep track of this somehow. Also, decide if you want to discard solves that include a song transition. Man, this is turning out to be more complicated than I'd thought.

 

[DynaXT]

I might do my own experiment like this, seems interesting

 

[Timona]

Tbh, I don't listen to music when solving, I listen to asmr and I don't see any difference from when im not listening to anything, my solves still average the same

 

[abunickabhi]

Listening to music tires the brain a bit more for me. So the sessions that I do with music are a bit shorter. Doing BLD with music is hard, especially bigBLD with music on at medium levels.

 

[Marco Rouxbio]

I got my first sub-20 (19.78) single and first sub-40 Ao5 (38.44) while listening to BTS.

 

[NigelTheCuber]

I hope this video answers ur question (i average high 5 on 2x2)

 

[Stock_Fish109]

YES, ABSOLUTELY YES, MUSIC MAKES ME SO MUCH SLOWER I CAN NOT LISTEN TO IT. MUSIC. MAKES. YOU. SLOWER. TRUST ME LITERALLY I CAN NOT CUBE WHILE LISTENING TO MUSIC IT MAKES ME LIKE 3-4 SECONDS SLOWER.



























































this is a joke no it doesnt

 

[Kaiju_cube]

you forgot Metal