Skip to main content
Atheneum
Start free

Music While Studying: Does It Help or Hurt?

What research says about studying with music or background noise: why lyrics hurt reading, what happened to the Mozart effect, and how to pick sound that helps.

Published · 9 min read

The short answer

It depends on the task. Background speech and songs with lyrics reliably make reading and memorizing a little worse, and even instrumental music and noise cost something on average. The Mozart effect did not hold up. For hard verbal work, silence is safest; for routine work or a noisy room, quiet instrumental music or steady sound is a reasonable choice.

Plenty of people can't study in silence, and plenty of others can't study with anything playing. Both groups tend to assume the other is doing it wrong. The research is clearer than the arguments: background sound is not neutral. Speech and songs with lyrics get in the way of reading and memorizing, and the famous "Mozart effect" turned out to be much smaller and more ordinary than it was sold as.

The bottom line: for work that is mostly words (reading, writing, learning definitions, memorizing), silence or steady sound without words is the safer bet. For routine work, or to cover up a noisy room, quiet instrumental music or a steady background sound is fine for many people. Pick the sound to suit the task, not the other way round.

Why words in the background get in the way

The clearest finding in this area is about speech. In classic experiments by Salamé and Baddeley, people saw a list of digits and had to recall them in order. Speech playing in the background disrupted their recall, even though they were told to ignore it and even when it was in a language they didn't understand. Psychologists call this the irrelevant speech effect, or more broadly the irrelevant sound effect.

A 1989 study by the same researchers tested music. Vocal music disrupted memory for the digits more than instrumental music did. In one experiment instrumental music was not reliably worse than silence, but in another it was, and steady noise, even noise rising and falling like speech, was no more disruptive than silence (Salamé & Baddeley, 1989). The general picture: sound that is speech-like, and especially sound with words, competes with the part of memory you use to hold words in mind.

Reading shows the same pattern. A 2018 meta-analysis pooled 65 studies of reading with background sound. Noise, speech and music all had a small but reliable negative effect on reading performance, for adults and children alike. Intelligible speech and music with lyrics caused the most disruption (Vasilev, Kirkby & Angele, 2018).

A study by Perham and Currie (2014) asked whether liking the music changes this. Students did a reading comprehension test, similar to a standardized admissions test, in quiet, with instrumental music, with lyrical music they liked, or with lyrical music they disliked. Scores were best in quiet and with instrumental music, and worst with lyrics, whether people liked the songs or not. Liking the song didn't protect them.

What the big reviews say about background music

Studies of background music in general point in different directions, which is why the topic stays argued over. A meta-analysis by Kämpfe, Sedlmeier and Renkewitz (2011) tried to sort this out across many kinds of task. Averaged over everything, background music had roughly no effect. But that average hid opposite effects underneath: compared with no music, background music disturbed reading and had small harmful effects on memory, while it improved mood and helped performance in sports.

So "music helps" and "music hurts" are both true, for different things. For a run, music can help. For learning from a textbook, the evidence leans the other way.

What happened to the Mozart effect

In 1993, a short paper in Nature reported that students did better on a spatial reasoning task after listening to a Mozart sonata for ten minutes than after silence or relaxation instructions (Rauscher, Shaw & Ky, 1993). The finding was quickly turned into products and advice promising that classical music makes you smarter.

It didn't survive the follow-ups. In 1999, Christopher Chabris summarized 16 studies in Nature and argued that any gain was small, limited to one kind of spatial task, and better explained by the listeners being more aroused and in a better mood (Chabris, 1999). A 2001 experiment tested that directly: a lively Mozart piece improved spatial scores, a slow, sad Albinoni piece did not, and once differences in arousal and mood were accounted for, the Mozart effect disappeared (Thompson, Schellenberg & Husain, 2001).

The largest review, by Pietschnig, Voracek and Formann (2010), pooled about 40 studies with more than 3,000 participants and concluded there is little evidence left for a specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect. They also found signs of publication bias, and found that studies from the original research group reported noticeably larger effects than studies by other labs.

What's left is modest and not specific to Mozart: music you enjoy can lift your mood and alertness for a while, and a better mood can help a little on some tasks. Note that the Mozart studies played music before the task, not during it.

Does personality matter?

Some people really do seem to cope with background music better than others. One commonly cited line of research looks at introverts and extraverts. In a small study by Furnham and Bradley (1997), with 10 introverts and 10 extraverts, pop music hurt immediate recall for both groups. After a delay, introverts who had studied with music remembered less than extraverts in the same condition, and introverts also did worse on reading comprehension with music playing.

This is a small, older study, so treat it as a hint rather than a rule. It fits a reasonable idea: if you find background sound draining, trust that and study in quiet. And whatever your personality, the reading and memory costs above were found on average, across ordinary students.

Why it works this way

  • Words compete with words. When you read or memorize, you are holding language in mind. Lyrics and speech push language at the same system, which makes it harder to keep your own words in order.
  • Changing sound grabs attention. Sound that varies a lot from moment to moment is harder to tune out than a steady background.
  • Mood is the real benefit. What music does reliably is change how you feel. That can make starting easier and a long session less grim, which matters, but it isn't the same as learning faster.

How to choose your study sound

Match the sound to the task.

TaskBetter choice
Reading new material, writing, memorizing words or definitionsSilence, or a steady sound with no words
Solving practice problems you already know how to doQuiet instrumental music or a steady sound, if you prefer it
Routine work (tidying notes, making a diagram neat, formatting)Whatever helps you keep going
A noisy room you can't leaveA steady sound to cover the noise, at low volume

Skip the lyrics for verbal work. This includes podcasts and videos playing in the background. If you can follow the words, they are costing you something.

Keep it low. Background sound should stay in the background. If you find yourself listening to it, it's too loud or too interesting.

Use steady sound to mask worse sound. If the choice is between a roommate's conversation and quiet rain, the rain is likely the smaller cost, since speech you can understand was among the most disruptive sounds in the studies above. This is a practical judgment, not a tested study prescription.

Use music for starting and for breaks. Since mood is where music reliably helps, play something you enjoy while you set up or during a break, then turn it down or off when the hard part starts. The Pomodoro technique gives you natural points to do this.

Test it on yourself honestly. Do one session in silence and one with your usual sound, then check what you actually remember with a few questions from memory. How a session felt is not a good guide.

Common mistakes

  • Treating "I like it" as "it helps." In the reading study above, liked lyrical music hurt comprehension as much as disliked lyrical music.
  • Studying with a show or video on. Speech you can follow is the most distracting background there is.
  • Hunting for the perfect playlist. Searching and skipping tracks is a distraction of its own, and it can turn into a way of putting off the work. The guide on procrastination covers that pattern.
  • Assuming classical music makes you smarter. The Mozart effect did not hold up.

Doing this in Atheneum

The Music page opens on a sound mixer: nine real recordings, including rain, wind, waves, a stream, a fire and a café, each with its own level, plus a master volume. Eight presets such as "Rainy library" and "Seaside" give you a starting point, and you can save your own mixes in your browser. For reading and memorizing, a mix without the café's chatter keeps words out of the background. The mix keeps playing while you use the rest of the app, including the Pomodoro timer. The Streams tab also plays long YouTube streams of lo-fi, noise, nature and classical music if you'd rather have music for routine work. See the sound mixer and music streams for details.

A quick start

  1. Look at what you need to do today and label each task "words" (reading, writing, memorizing) or "routine."
  2. For the words tasks, study in silence or with a steady sound with no voices, at low volume.
  3. Save music you enjoy for routine tasks and for your breaks.
  4. If your room is noisy, cover it with a steady sound rather than a song you know the words to.
  5. At the end, close your notes and write down what you remember, so you judge the session by what stuck. If your phone is the bigger distraction, read phones and studying next.

Background sound can make studying more pleasant. Just keep the words out of your ears when you need them in your head.

Sources

Try it in your own workspace.

Atheneum brings your notes, focus timer and review into one place. The free plan needs no card.

Start for freeSee the features