Make a tuneful lab a happy lab

Labs all across the world have music echoing around the Petri dishes keeping their researchers happy and motivated. But playing your favourite tracks can be a minefield – here Dr Matthew Partridge takes through the pitfalls of making a tuneful lab a happy lab. 

Shakespeare wrote that "If music be the food of love then play on". Clearly he was wrong; everyone knows that pizza is the food of love. If Shakespeare had been more science minded he would have seen that music is, in fact, the snack of science.

Now playing music in a lab is contentious – not just between those that like it and those that don't – but between the vast array of differing options about what to have on. Only mythically lucky researchers have their own labs, most of us have to share with other researchers – all with their own diverse range of terrible music tastes.

You may think that headphones would solve this problem. But headphones tend to limit the ability of researchers to hear when you shout "Hey watch out for that giant fireball!", so headphone wearing researchers tend not to last in labs. As such, like it or not, you need to come to some kind of accord with your lab mates in selecting something you can all listen to.

Talk radio is always popular but very dependent on who's talking. In the UK Radio 4 is excellent but come the afternoon you’ll need to really like a lot of 1800s drama about unrequited love otherwise its charm may wear thin. With all talk radio, you'll get some time devoted to covering the news and politics. Politics is the very last thing you want being discussed in the lab, nothing sours a lab atmosphere quicker than finding out one of you voted for whichever party is evil at the moment. More upbeat toe-tapping music is always nice and there's plenty of inoffensive rock out there to keep everyone happy. The trick here is to keep away from the heavier metal and rock because headbanging can lead to some expensive glassware losses. On a similar note, I'd avoid classical music because air-conducting is almost unavoidable and pipette racks are bound to go flying.

Once you've decided on the kind of music (and possibly a schedule so complicated that it makes Dr Who continuity look positively linear) you next need to agree on a music producing box. A good lab speaker system needs to have two important properties. Firstly it has to essentially be disposable. Labs are exciting places, more so if you have students, and things like radios tend to come to damp ends. Some lab radios have lasted decades in their high-risk environments – of course, you can't buy this kind of radio but from time to time you might get lucky enough for a 'science resistant' radio to evolve naturally due to chemical exposure.

It also needs giant buttons, well I say buttons because the first thing you should do is remove all buttons except the power button. This avoids the thorny issue of volume. But once you've finally decided on a music selection that everyone agrees with, playing on a device that is both lab friendly and semi-disposable, you may well realise that you've wasted hours on this and your project is now a long way behind.