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- Memory performance was worst for high arousal, negative music.
- Performance is still best in complete silence rather than any type of music.

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- High arousal, positive music: upbeat tempos combined with happier harmonies. High arousal, negative music: upbeat tempos, but chord structures are darker and more ominous. Low arousal, positive music: slow tempos combined with major chords. Low arousal, negative music: slow tempos, but melodies are dominated by minor chords that elicit feelings of despondency.
- Memory performance was best while listening to low arousal, negative music.

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Can Listening to Music Actually Help You Concentrate?

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Can Listening to Music Actually Help You Concentrate?

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Arousal level plus positive or negative types of music and how they affect performance.

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Can Listening to Music Help You Concentrate? | Cambridge Brain Sciences Blog

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Do you enjoy listening to music while working? Find out if this is helping or harming your concentration.

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- Performance with music in the background does not depend on like or dislike of the music, both have a negative response.
- Music may improve mood, but it does not help people learn new or complex material.

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- "Music may impair cognitive abilities in these scenarios because if you're trying to memorize things in order, you may get thrown off by the changing words and notes in your chosen song."

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Drowned in sound: how  listening to music hinders learning

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Drowned in sound: how  listening to music hinders learning

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How music, specifically with lyrics, is the main cause of poor performance, which is what most students typically listen to and why it is unhelpful for learning.

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers, as we all seek to answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school? This time, we consider growth mindset.
Many students do their homework and revision while listening to music. Many of them will swear that listening to their favourite songs makes them study better. But does music help or hinder learning? And does it matter what type of music you listen to while revising?

Researchers from the applied psychology department of Cardiff Metropolitan University led a study to answer this question. The authors, Nick Perham and Harriet Currie, assigned students into one of four groups: the first revised in silence, the second revised while listening to music with lyrics they liked (which included songs from One Direction and Katy Perry), the third group revised to music with lyrics they did not like (which comprised of very heavy metal bands), and the fourth group revised listening to music without lyrics.

The participants then took a test on the passages they had been revising, rating how distracting their environment had been, as well as writing down their predictions for how well they thought they had done.

What are the main findings?

1. Students who revised in quiet environments performed more than 60% better in an exam than their peers who revised while listening to music that had lyrics.

2. Students who revised while listening to music without lyrics did better than those who had revised to music with lyrics.

3. It made no difference if students revised listening to songs they liked or disliked. Both led to a reduction in their test performance.

4. Students who revised in silence rated their environment as less distracting and accurately predicted that this would lead to better performances in subsequent tests.

Related research

There are some benefits to listening to music while performing certain tasks. It can be quite motivating and it can improve mood (listening to your favourite song tends to make people smile, for example). But it does not help people learn new or complex material.

The misconception that music does help us learn stems from a series of studies linked to the " Mozart effect ", which found that people performed better on a series of cognitive tasks after listening to 10 minutes of Mozart. Participants in these studies appeared to be getting smarter and performing better in tests.

However, further research has since revealed this is not the case. While listening to music before a task can make someone feel better, listening to it while trying to learn something new tends not to help. This is because music - especially tunes with lyrics - can take up processing space. This conflicts with the material you are trying to learn, effectively creating a bottleneck in your memory, as there is less space to process what you are revising.

What does this mean for the classroom?

It is important that students are made aware of the pitfalls of listening to music when revising. Perham and Currie's study found that students rated the quiet environment as less distracting and better for them, yet many students continue to listen to music during their homework. Why? Perhaps they're doing so out of habit, or they confuse what improves their mood with what leads to good revision, or it alleviates boredom. Perhaps it's simply because everyone else is doing it.

Students need to know how to revise well. There may well be a time and place to listen to music during the course of their revision, but not when they are learning new and complex material. After all, silence is golden.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist, director at InnerDrive and author of Release Your Inner Drive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter, and get advice on improving memory and a visual summary of this research on his website
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network the latest articles direct to your inbox Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist

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Drowned in sound: how listening to music hinders learning

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There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students, but academic studies of this kind aren't always easy to access or translate into the realities of classroom practice.

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How music may harm your thought process while studying more than you think.

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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order - facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table - the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, United Kingdom, looked at the ability to recall information in the presence of different sounds. They instructed 25 participants between ages 18 and 30 try to memorize, and later recall, a list of letters in order. The study authors are Nick Perham and Joanne Vizard, and the study will appear in the September 2010 issue of Applied Clinical Psychology.

Participants were tested under various listening conditions: quiet, music that they'd said they liked, music that they'd said they didn't like, a voice repeating the number three, and a voice reciting random single-digit numbers.

The study found that participants performed worst while listening to music, regardless of whether they liked that music, and to the speech of random numbers. They did the best in the quiet and while listening to the repeated "three."

Music may impair cognitive abilities in these scenarios because if you're trying to memorize things in order, you may get thrown off by the changing words and notes in your chosen song, the authors speculate.

Although other studies have found benefits to listening to music before performing a task, the authors note that this new research presents a more realistic scenario: hearing music at the same time as doing the expected task.

In the 1990s, listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was thought to increase spatial abilities, but subsequent research failed to find the same effect. But other studies have found a "Schubert effect" for people who like the music of Franz Schubert, and a "Stephen King" effect for people who liked a narrated story by that author. The explanation for all of this could be that when you hear something you like, it heightens your arousal and mood, which improves performance, Perham and Vizard note.

The new study does not necessarily contradict those previous findings, but does suggests some limitations on the benefits of music in memorizing lists of things in order, the authors wrote. It may still be the case that listening to music before performing a task like that helps cognitive abilities. But this new research suggests that it might be better to study for an exam in quiet, or listen to music beforehand.

Still, given the small sample size, the study provides only preliminary results that need to be further explored in other experiments.

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elizabeth landau - cnn.com health writer/producer

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Music may harm your studying, study says

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If you're studying for a test, putting on background music that you like may seem like a good idea. But if you're trying to memorize a list in order -- facts, numbers, elements of the periodic table -- the music may actually be working against you, a new study suggests.

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- Music can have beneficial effects on creativity, but may impact performance.
- The positive effect of Mozart was due to the optimum mood levels and arousal, rather than the music itself.

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Music only helps you concentrate if you're doing the right kind of task

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Music only helps you concentrate if you're doing the right kind of task

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The effects of music on performance based on the type of music.

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Music and work don't always mix. wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

The assumption that listening to music when working is beneficial to output likely has its roots in the so-called " Mozart effect", which gained wide media attention in the early 1990s. Put simply, this is the finding that spatial rotation performance (mentally rotating a 3D dimensional shape to determine whether it matches another or not) is increased immediately after listening to the music of Mozart, compared to relaxation instructions or no sound at all. Such was the attention that this finding garnered that the then US governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed giving free cassettes or CDs of Mozart's music to prospective parents.

Subsequent studies have cast doubt on the necessity of the music of Mozart to produce this effect - a " Schubert effect", a " Blur effect", and even a " Stephen King effect" (his audiobook rather than his singing) have all been observed. In addition, musicians could show the effect purely from imagining the music rather than actually listening to it.

So researchers then suggested that the "Mozart effect" was not due to his music as such, but rather to people's optimum levels of mood and arousal. And so it became the " mood and arousal effect ".

Unfortunately, the situations in which most mood and arousal effects are observed are slightly unrealistic. Do we really sit and listen to music, switch it off, and then engage in our work in silence? More likely is that we work with our favourite tunes playing in the background.

Pressmaster/Shutterstock

How sound affects performance has been the topic of laboratory research for over 40 years, and is observed through a phenomenon called the irrelevant sound effect. Basically, this effect means that performance is poorer when a task is undertaken in the presence of background sound (irrelevant sound that you are ignoring), in comparison to quiet.

To study irrelevant sound effect, participants are asked to complete a simple task which requires them to recall a series of numbers or letters in the exact order in which they saw them - similar to trying to memorise a telephone number when you have no means to write it down. In general, people achieve this by rehearsing the items either aloud or under their breath. The tricky thing is being able to do this while ignoring any background noise.

Two key characteristics of the irrelevant sound effect are required for its observation. First, the task must require the person to use their rehearsal abilities, and second, the sound must contain acoustical variation - for example, sounds such as "n, r, p" as opposed to "c, c, c". Where the sound does not vary much acoustically, then performance of the task is much closer to that observed in quiet conditions. Interestingly, it does not matter whether the person likes the sound or not. Performance is equally as poor whether the background sound is music the person likes or dislikes.

The irrelevant sound effect itself comes from attempting to process two sources of ordered information at the same time - one from the task and one from the sound. Unfortunately, only the former is required to successfully perform the serial recall task, and the effort expended in ensuring that irrelevant order information from the sound is not processed actually impedes this ability.

A similar conflict is also seen when reading while in the presence of lyrical music. In this situation, the two sources of words - from the task and the sound - are in conflict. The subsequent cost is poorer performance of the task in the presence of music with lyrics.

What this all means is that whether having music playing in the background helps or hinders performance depends on the task and on the type of music, and only understanding this relationship will help people maximise their productivity levels. If the task requires creativity or some element of mental rotation then listening to music one likes can increase performance. In contrast, if the task requires one to rehearse information in order then quiet is best, or, in the case of reading comprehension, quiet or instrumental music.

One promising area of the impact of music on cognitive abilities stems from actually learning to play a musical instrument. Studies show that children who are being musically trained show an improvement in intellectual abilities. However, the reasons behind this are, at present, unknown and likely to be complex. It may not be the music per se that produces this effect but more the activities associated with studying music, such as concentration, repeated practice, lessons and homework.

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Music only helps you concentrate if you're doing the right kind of task

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Many of us listen to music while we work, thinking that it will help us to concentrate on the task at hand. And in fact, recent research has found that music can have beneficial effects on creativity. When it comes to other areas of performance, however, the impact of background music is more complicated.

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- Performance is typically poorer with background sound, rather than complete silence.

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- Music effects mood, blood pressure and heart rate.
- Classical or electronic dance music is the best way to go due to its lack of lyrics, as well as nature or ambient sounds.
- Consider the tempo and volume level; don't drown out thoughts or enable distraction.

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What type of music you should listen to, and what effects they have on the human brain.

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Listen. What's that in the background? Is it rock, country or classical music? Did you know that certain types of music can help you focus?

March is Music in Our Schools Month, which was created to increase awareness of the importance of music in student's lives.

"Music has the potential to take a person from the Beta brainwave state to deeper Alpha, and then Theta brainwave states, depending on the music," explained Dr. Masha Godkin, a professor in the Department of Marriage and Family Sciences at Northcentral University.

"Music activates both the left and right brain at the same time, and the activation of both hemispheres can maximize learning and improve memory," says Dr. Masha Godkin

According to Godkin, it's good to stick with classical music. One reason this genre works well is that there are no lyrics to distract you. You can also branch out into meditation music, which is ideal for concentration as it is meant to relieve stress and relax your mind.

Music has a profound effect on our mood, blood pressure, and heart rate. For the best music to focus and study, choose tunes that keep you awake but won't cause you to start tapping your body to the beat.

Instead of relying on the radio or a random mix on Pandora or Spotify, it can help to create a playlist of the best study music for concentration. You can plan a set amount of uninterrupted music, which serves as a built-in timer for studying. When the music is up, you've earned a break.

Everyone's taste in music is different, but when it comes to creating the best study music playlist, here are some genres and tips to consider:

Go Classical
You may not want to go to a symphony concert, but the soothing sounds of classical orchestra music seem to increase mood and productivity, which makes it great for studying.

Consider Tempo
Music with 60-70 beats per minute like Beethoven's Fur Elise appears to help students study longer and retain more information.

Spa Music
Ambient sounds that you would expect to hear on a soundtrack during a spa treatment can help you relax.

Nature Sounds
Like ambient music, the sounds of babbling brooks, birds, wind and rain are very calming and make great background noise. You can even create your own mix with websites like Noisli.

Electronic Music
New Age and ambient EDM music are a good choice for those who don't like classical. Any music with little to no lyrics is best.

Sound Control
The volume of your study music is key. Don't drown out your own thoughts. Remember, it's supposed to be in the background.

We would love to know what's on your study playlist. Follow Northcentral University on Facebook or Twitter and let us know what music helps you get through school!

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Listen. What's that in the background? Is it rock, country or classical music? Did you know that certain types of music can help you focus?March is Music in Our Schools Month, which was created to increase awareness of the importance of music in student's lives.