Can music help you study?

Do you listen to music while you study? Some people swear by it, others can’t stand it. What does science say?

Over the years, several research groups have studied how music affects learning or whether music can help you concentrate. These studies are all different: they look at different types of music, different types of studying, different test subjects, and they take different measurements.

In this post, I’ll round up some of the ones that show a positive or neutral effect of music on studying. In the next post, they’ll be more negative or neutral. So keep in mind that, like most articles about scientific studies, one post does not cover all aspects of the topic.

Make music part of the studying process

One type of studying involves memorizing things and later recalling them. That’s how you would study lists of vocabulary words, or biology or history facts, for example. In one study from earlier this year, researchers from the University of Ulm in Germany tested whether it matters in which way you are presented with the information that you need to remember. Is there a difference between reading text, hearing spoken word, or hearing a song? The researchers, Janina Lehmann and Tina Seufert, discovered that it was easiest to memorize text if you read it, but that people who heard it as a song…