When deciding on what music to improve productivity at work, you may want to consider two important variables: predictability and novelty. Associate Professor Thackery Brown in the School of Psychology has been working with Yiren Ren, a sixth-year PhD student, on examining how music affected a subject’s ability to process or remember new information. “Music is just such an emotional medium,” says Ren. “It can not only modulate how you feel at that moment, it can also modulate the memory you’re recalling at that moment and how you perceive that memory itself.”