Listening To Music While Working
The Best “Study Music” Is Actually Just Whatever You Like Listening To
In 1993, a one-page article in the famous scientific journal Nature reported that participants solved problems better after listening to Mozart. This vaguely intuitive and groundbreaking finding was the spark for an explosion in media reporting and research, known to many as the Mozart effect.
More than 20 years later, many studies have tried to prove this effect: in classic academia fashion, we found out that the situation was a lot more complicated than we thought.
Today, there’s an almost equal split between people who think background music helps boost work (and who use it a lot more), and people who don’t. Funnily enough, they both have plenty of research papers proving they’re right.
Popular Theories on Background Music
The original Mozart effect paper was based on the Trion model, saying that the brain activates in similar ways when listening to music and solving problems. Other researchers later pointed out that Nature only published the original article when the authors removed all mention of this theory, which was unbacked.
A new field was born, and studies all the way from the “Blur effect” (English Rock Band) to the “Stephen King effect” (Yes, actually) led scientists to the Arousal Mood Hypothesis: Music changes how you feel, and how you feel changes how well your brain works.
This works well with other studies that talk about how soft music reduces pain and anxiety, and even helps surgeons operate better. On the other hand, listening to music you don’t like can reduce reading ability.
Distraction Conflict Theory and Cognitive Capacity Hypothesis are two more ideas that have popped up: fancy ways of saying (1) that music takes up our attention and (2) that music takes up some brain space. These both say that learning will become harder when listening to background music, but the first one also suggests that music can boost performance for boring activities by keeping you focused. In fact, a small study showed that you exercise harder when you listen to music you like (although I’m sure you’ve noticed this already).
There are tons of other theories, ranging from saying that Introverts perform worse with background music because they are more sensitive to stimulation, to saying that the level of musical training might affect how well you respond.
These are all pretty good theories, but the problem is that even recent reviews show that scientists can’t seem to agree on the actual effect of background music. For every study supporting a benefit, there’s another showing a negative: this is often because studies don’t control the same factors, but also because there’s a lot of them.
Despite this, there are some interesting nuggets of research we can explore.
Music can help you focus and feel good
There’s decent evidence that background music can help you focus. This is more obvious for boring tasks (like counting ‘*’s), and tends to be found when using soft music. Music is also proved to change how you feel: this is a different rabbit hole so we won’t cover it in detail, but in short it’s likely that if you’re more motivated you’ll also be more productive,
These effects are great, but also slightly different from the question of whether you learn/think as well when listening to music, which is still up in the air.
However, there are specific areas where music can improve learning, such as for a second language: when music was added to an online course teaching Mandarin or Arabic, learners did significantly better. Music can also be an interesting treatment option for kids with autism or brain development issues, although this strays more towards helping their social abilities.
Higher working memory capacity also seems to make you less sensitive to any negative effects of background music: this kind of works with the distraction theory we mentioned before, as people who can juggle more things in their memories can leave space for music as well as thinking.
What about lyrics?
For memory, lyrics can affect short-term recall more than non-lyrical music, but in the long term there’s no difference to memory, while there’s a pretty much equal split on whether lyrical background music either benefits or impairs problem solving. Classical music tends to have the most studies finding positive effects, while pop tends to be the opposite: but the sample size here is pretty small.
Why you should do whatever you want
This means it probably isn’t worth stressing over the exact type of music you play. Instead, focusing on the mood-based effects puts more importance on playing music that you like.
It also depends on what you’re used to: the main reason people don’t listen to music is because they find it distracting. A recent review on this suggested that the young people with the habit of listening to music actually find it much less distracting, which explains the fact that older people are much less likely to listen to music while working.
People also naturally seem to sense when background music helps them. Even those who support using background music don’t use it all the time, especially when doing hard problems: in these cases, they tend to use classical, calm, and non-vocal music - so there may be something behind that. However, in most other cases people don’t care much about the type of music.
If you like music, don’t feel like you have to shut it off or select a specific genre; if you find it distracting, don’t feel like you need to listen to anything. Because music is a personal experience, your intuition is almost always right about when and what to play.
(Just don’t do anything extreme like watching a TV show in the background, because that definitely does affect your learning.)
Thanks for reading! I’m trying out a different format where I’m only including the links to reviews/important sources at the bottom: If you ever need the full list, feel free to reach out at abouttolearn@substack.com.
2020, Journal Impact Factor - 3.6
The influence of music on the surgical task performance: A systematic review
2020, Journal Impact Factor - 13.4
Effects of music on task performance, engagement, and behavior: A literature review (sagepub.com)
2017, Journal Impact Factor - 1.6
2021, Journal Impact Factor - 1.8