Exploring the Effect of Music on User Typing and Identification through Keystroke Dynamics

This paper explores the relationship between music and keyboard typing behavior. In particular, we focus on how it affects keystroke-based authentication systems. To this end, we conducted an online experiment (N=43), where participants were asked to replicate paragraphs of text while listening to music at varying tempos and loudness levels across two sessions. Our findings reveal that listening to music leads to more errors and faster typing if the music is fast. Identification through a biometric model was improved when music was played either during its training or testing. This hints at the potential of music for increasing identification performance and a tradeoff between this benefit and user distraction. Overall, our research sheds light on typing behavior and introduces music as a subtle and effective tool to influence user typing behavior in the context of keystroke-based authentication.