Does music help you study? What the research found
Ask a classroom whether music helps them study and most hands go up. The research gives a narrower answer. It depends on what you are doing, and above all on whether the music has words.
Where the idea came from
The belief that music sharpens the mind owes a lot to one small study. In 1993 Rauscher, Shaw and Ky at the University of California, Irvine, tested thirty-six undergraduate students. After listening to ten minutes of a Mozart sonata for two pianos, the students scored 8 to 9 points higher on a spatial reasoning subtest of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale than after relaxation instructions or silence.
Two details are usually left out. The authors themselves described the improvement as short-term, lasting only ten to fifteen minutes. And the students listened first and took the test afterwards. The study says nothing about music playing while you work.
Later work shrank the finding. Chabris combined 20 published comparisons of Mozart with silence, covering 714 subjects, and found an average improvement that he put at only 1.4 IQ points. Pietschnig, Voracek and Formann combined nearly 40 studies with over 3000 subjects. They found a small effect on spatial tasks after the Mozart sonata, and a similar effect after other music. Their conclusion was that little evidence is left for a specific Mozart effect.
Thompson, Schellenberg and Husain offered an explanation. They compared a Mozart sonata, a pleasant and energetic piece, with a slow, sad adagio by Albinoni. Spatial performance was better after music than after silence only for those who heard Mozart. When differences in enjoyment, arousal and mood were held constant, the effect disappeared. The authors concluded that it was an artifact of arousal and mood.
What happens when you read with music on
Studying usually means reading, and here the evidence is more direct. Perham and Currie asked thirty undergraduates in south Wales to read passages from practice SAT tests and answer comprehension questions. Each student did this in quiet, with lyrical music they liked, with lyrical music they disliked, and with non-lyrical music.
Comprehension was significantly lower in both lyrical conditions than in quiet. It made no significant difference whether the student liked the song. With non-lyrical music, scores did not differ significantly from quiet. This was thirty university students, and the non-lyrical music was a single thrash metal track chosen by the researchers, so it is a pointer and not a verdict.
A larger study points the same way for younger students. Anderson and Fuller gave a reading comprehension test to 334 students in the 7th and 8th grades, once without music and once with hit singles from the 2006 charts playing. Performance declined significantly with the music. The authors report a pronounced detrimental effect for the students who had a stronger preference for listening to music while studying.
Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele pulled 65 studies of reading with background sound together. They found that background noise, speech and music all have a small but reliably detrimental effect on reading performance. Intelligible speech and lyrical music were the most distracting.
The songs you like are not an exception
It is tempting to think a favourite song is different. Perham and Vizard tested this with serial recall, which means remembering short lists in order. Recall was poorer with music than in quiet, and there was no difference between liked and disliked music. That is one narrow memory task, but it matches the reading result: liking the song did not protect anyone from it.
What about music without words?
Souza and Barbosa tested 136 psychology students at the University of Porto on verbal memory, visual memory, reading comprehension and arithmetic. The students worked in silence, with instrumental lo-fi hip-hop, and with popular songs with lyrics.
Music with lyrics made verbal and visual memory worse than silence. In the reading task, students answered more accurately with instrumental music than with lyrical music. In arithmetic, background music had no credible effect. The instrumental music did not credibly help or hinder performance compared with silence.
The students' own judgements are the interesting part. They were aware that lyrics got in the way. But they sometimes perceived the instrumental music as beneficial, although it had no credible effect on their scores. The authors conclude that instrumental music should be preferred to music with lyrics, but that on performance alone it should not be recommended over silence.
A meta-analysis of background music in adults by Kämpfe, Sedlmeier and Renkewitz explains why the overall picture looks muddled. Taken all together, the studies showed a null effect, most probably because specific effects average each other out. Background music disturbed reading and had some small detrimental effects on memory, but it had a positive impact on emotional reactions and improved achievements in sports.
What to do with this
Most of these studies used university students and short tasks, so treat them as a guide to test, not as rules.
When the work is made of words, such as reading a chapter, memorising definitions or writing an answer, songs with lyrics are the riskiest choice. Your brain is being asked to process two streams of language at once.
If silence feels hard, music without words is the safer option. The evidence does not say it will help. It says it is less likely to hurt.
The Mozart studies point to something else. A pleasant, energetic piece heard before a task may change your arousal and mood, but in those studies any gain on a spatial test was small and short-lived. That is a different thing from music during the task.
Above all, do not trust the feeling that the playlist is helping. Run your own test: learn one list in silence and another with your usual music, then check which one you remember tomorrow.