11. Music and Studying

There has been a great deal of research on the impact of music on cognitive activities related to studying. Many different factors can contribute to the outcomes, including the type of music, the nature of the task being undertaken, individual differences and the relationship of the individual to the particular music involved. Each of these will be considered in this chapter. As many studies address several of these issues simultaneously, each study will be considered in relation to its main focus. The theories attempting to explain the various findings will also be outlined. There has been some confusion in the reporting of the research between studies where music is presented prior to the task being undertaken (what has become known as the Mozart effect) and research where music is played in the background while the task is being undertaken. These different approaches are frequently considered as equivalent. Here they are considered separately.

Listening to Music prior to Completing a Task

The positive effect of listening to music prior to undertaking a cognitive task was first associated with the music of Mozart. A group of college students performed a spatial-temporal task after they listened to Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major, KV 448. Their performance was compared to groups who either listened to a relaxation recording or sat in silence before completing the task. The group listening to Mozart performed significantly better than the other groups (Rauscher et al., 1993). A second study, using the same Mozart composition, repetitive music or a short story, replicated these findings (Rauscher et al., 1995). Since this research, there have been many studies attempting replication. The findings from these have been mixed. Some examples are set out below.

Rideout and Taylor (1997) studied 32 undergraduates who completed two equivalent spatial reasoning tests: one following a control procedure and one following the presentation of Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos in D major. Their performance showed a small but significant improvement immediately following presentation of the music. Similarly, Wilson and Brown (1997) studied spatial reasoning in 22 college undergraduates who were exposed to ten minutes of a Mozart piano concerto, repetitive relaxation music or silence prior to undertaking a pencil and paper maze task. The mazes varied in complexity and size. Limited support for the Mozart effect was obtained for the number of maze recursions and the overall quality of maze solutions.

Adopting a neurological perspective, Jaušovec and colleagues (2006), in two experiments, investigated the influence that Mozart’s sonata, K. 448, had on brain activity in the process of learning. In the first experiment, individuals were trained in how to solve spatial rotation tasks, and then were required to solve similar tasks. Fifty-six students were divided into four groups: a control group which prior to and after training relaxed, and three experimental groups—one group who prior to and after training listened to Mozart, one who prior to training listened to Mozart and subsequently relaxed, and a fourth group who prior to training relaxed and afterwards listened to Mozart. In the second experiment, 36 respondents were divided into three groups: a control group, a second group who listened to Mozart prior to and after training, and a third group who prior to and after training listened to Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. In both experiments, EEG data were collected during problem-solving. In the first experiment, all of the respondents in the various music groups showed better task performance than the control group, although those experiencing music before and after the task displayed less complex EEG patterns and more alpha-band synchronisation than did respondents in the other three groups. In the second experiment, individuals who listened to Mozart showed better task performance than did the respondents in the other groups. They also displayed less complex EEG patterns and more lower alpha-band synchronisation than did the respondents in the Brahm’s music group. The authors argued that Mozart’s music, by activating task-relevant brain areas, enhanced the learning of spatial-temporal rotation tasks. The results supported Rauscher and colleagues’ (1993) priming explanation of the Mozart effect.

Working with children, Hallam (2001) and Schellenberg and Hallam (2005) replicated Rauscher’s study with over 6,000 children in the final year of primary school. The children were randomly allocated within their school to one of three groups: a group listening to the same Mozart piano sonata as in the Rauscher study, one to pop music performed by the pop groups Blur and Oasis, and the third to a talk about experiments. Each of these sessions lasted for ten minutes. Following this, the children completed two spatial reasoning tasks: a paper folding task and a rotational task. The initial analysis (Hallam, 2001) showed no statistically significant difference between the groups on either task. A second analysis by Schellenberg and Hallam (2005) showed a slight statistical advantage for the children listening to popular music. This was interpreted in terms of raised arousal levels and higher motivation because the children liked the popular music. Schellenberg (2005) argued that such short-term effects resulted from the impact of music on changes in arousal level and mood. Following this, Schellenberg and colleagues (2007) undertook two further experiments. In the first, Canadian undergraduates performed better on a symbol-search test after listening to an up-tempo piece of music composed by Mozart in comparison to a slow piece by Albinoni. However, the effect was evident only when the two pieces of music induced reliable differences in arousal and mood. Performance on other intellectual tasks was not affected. In the second experiment, Japanese five-year-olds drew for longer periods of time after singing or hearing familiar children’s songs than after hearing Mozart or Albinoni. After hearing the children’s songs, their drawings were judged by adults to be more creative, energetic and technically proficient. These findings illustrate that prior exposure to different types of music can enhance performance on a variety of tasks; the effects are mediated by changes in emotional state and can generalise across cultures and age groups.

Exploring whether arousal and mood were responsible for Rauscher’s original findings, Thompson and colleagues (2001) studied 24 college students, aged 20 to 60 years old, who completed a test of spatial abilities after either listening to a pleasant and energetic sonata by Mozart, sitting in silence or listening to Albinoni’s adagio, a slow reflective piece. Enjoyment, arousal and mood were also assessed. Performance on the spatial task was better following exposure to the composition by Mozart. The two pieces of music induced differential responding to measures of enjoyment, arousal and mood. When these were controlled for, the Mozart effect disappeared. Focusing on the role of mood, Smith and colleagues (2010) carried out two studies. The first explored the effects of prior exposure to office noise on working memory, while the second was a replication of Rauscher and colleagues’ (1993) study. The first study showed that mental arithmetic tasks were initially impaired by office noise, but that the effects of the noise disappeared following ten minutes of exposure to office noise between tasks. The second experiment successfully replicated Rauscher and colleagues’ (1993) study showing enhanced spatial reasoning following listening to Mozart for 24 young adults, although assessment of the mood of participants demonstrated that the effect was not caused by mood change. Also focusing on the impact of mood and arousal on spatial reasoning, Hussain and colleagues (2002) examined the effects of tempo and mode. A Mozart sonata performed by a skilled pianist was recorded and edited to produce four versions that varied in tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor). Participants listened to a single version and completed measures of spatial ability, arousal and mood. Performance on the spatial task was superior after listening to music at a fast rather than a slow tempo, and when the music was presented in major rather than minor mode. Tempo manipulations affected arousal but not mood, whereas mode manipulations affected mood but not arousal.

Nantais and Schellenberg (1999) found that performance on a spatial-temporal task was better after participants listened to a piece composed by Mozart or by Schubert than after they sat in silence. In a second study, the advantage for the music condition disappeared when the control condition consisted of a narrated story instead of silence. The participants’ performance was a function of their preference for either the music or the story, with better performance following the preferred condition. Similarly, Perham and Withey (2012) found that preferred music increased spatial rotation performance regardless of the tempo of the music. Participants listened to both liked and disliked music, in either a fast or slow tempo, prior to completing a series of spatial rotation tasks. At both tempos, liked music was associated with significantly better spatial rotation performance than disliked music.

Some research has focused on music acting as a primer for memory tasks with participants of varied ages. For instance, Hirokawa (2004) examined the effects of preferred music and relaxation instructions on older adults’ arousal and working memory. Fifteen female older adults participated in ten minutes of three experimental conditions: participants’ preferred music, relaxation instructions or silence. Four subcategories of arousal level, energy, tiredness, tension and calmness were measured before and after experimental treatment using an adjective checklist. After each experimental condition, participants completed a working memory test. The findings showed that music increased participants’ energy levels, while relaxation and silence significantly decreased them. Relaxation and silence interventions also increased tiredness and calmness. All experimental conditions decreased tension levels, although working memory performance was not significantly different between the groups. Also focusing on working memory, Steele and colleagues (1997) studied 36 undergraduate students who completed a backwards digit-span task followed by exposure to ten minutes of music composed by Mozart, a recording of rain, or silence and a repetition of the task. No significant differences among treatment conditions were found, although there was a significant effect of practice. In a later study, Steele and colleagues (1999) followed the detailed procedural guidance offered by Rauscher and colleagues needed to produce the Mozart effect. Despite this, Steele and colleagues were unable to produce either a statistically significant Mozart effect or an effect size suggesting practical significance. They concluded that there was little evidence to support the existence of the Mozart effect.

Also offering limited support to the Mozart effect, Twomey and Esgate (2002) compared the performance of 20 musicians and 20 non-musicians on spatial-temporal reasoning tasks following exposure to Mozart’s Sonata K. 448. They based their research on the trion model of neural functioning, which is highly structured in time and spatial connections and predicts increased synchrony between musical and spatial temporal centres in the right cerebral hemisphere. Since increased left-hemispheric involvement in music processing occurs as a result of musical training, the possibility of increased synchrony with left-hemispheric areas in the musicians was tested. The results were improved performance on language as well as spatial-temporal tasks. In addition to spatial-temporal tasks, synonym generation and rhyming-word generation tasks were employed. A Mozart effect was demonstrated on the spatial-temporal task, although this was greater for the non-musicians. There was no effect of musical priming for either group on verbal tasks, although the musicians scored higher on rhyming-word generation. No systematic link was found between performance on any task and the number of years spent in musical training. The failure to induce a Mozart effect in the musicians on verbal tasks, as well as the limited impact on their performance on the spatial-temporal tasks, may have been associated with a ceiling effect due to the long-term effects of music training.

Working with 448 younger and older adults with mean ages of 28 and 72 respectively, Giannouli and colleagues (2019) provided participants with novel excerpts by Mozart, Vivaldi and Glass, or silence—after which they completed a forward digit-span test and a word-fluency test to assess verbal working memory and phonologically cued semantic retrieval. Individual preference for each condition was also assessed. Brief exposure to music had no beneficial effect on verbal working memory and there was transient impairment after listening to Vivaldi, although the Vivaldi excerpt did induce a marked enhancement in word fluency, but only in the young adults. In contrast, listening to Mozart’s music was followed by decreased word-fluency test scores in both age groups. These findings suggest that, depending on specific musical features, listening to music can selectively facilitate or inhibit ongoing verbal functions. Similarly, Borella and colleagues (2019) examined whether short- and long-term working memory training in older adults could be enhanced by listening to music. Mozart’s Sonata K. 448 and Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor were played to participants aged 65 to 75 years old before they started working-memory training activities. One group of 19 participants listened to Mozart, another to Albinoni and one to white noise, while eighteen participants served as controls and engaged in other activities. Specific training gains on a task similar to the one used in training and transfer effects to visuo-spatial abilities, executive functioning and reasoning were assessed. Irrespective of the specific listening condition, the trained groups generally outperformed the control group. The white-noise group did not differ in performance from the two music groups, although the group listening to the Albinoni composition showed larger specific training gains in the criterion task in the short-term and on transfer effects in the reasoning task in the short- and long-term compared to the group listening to the composition by Mozart.

Also working with older adults, but in this case with those with mild cognitive impairment, Lake and Goldstein (2011) exposed participants to a music and a silence condition, following which they performed digit-span and coding tasks, both of which require attention for maximal performance. Listening to music did not enhance performance for either group. Researching a wider age range, Carr and Rickard (2016) tested whether listening to emotionally arousing music enhanced memory in 37 participants aged 18 to 50, who listened to two of their own highly enjoyed music tracks, two self-rated neutral tracks from other participants’ selections, and a five-minute radio interview. After each listening episode, participants memorised a unique array of 24 images. Subjective and physiological emotional arousal was monitored throughout the experiment and free recall of all images within the five image arrays was tested at the end. Compared to the music and non-music controls, self-selected enjoyed music elicited greater subjective and physiological changes consistent with changes in emotion. More details from images presented were recalled after enjoyed music than after listening to the radio interview. The physiological changes consistent with an emotional arousal response to enjoyed music reliably predicted memory performance.

In a study exploring the impact of music from different cultures, Giroux and colleagues (2020) examined whether listening to pleasant, stimulating or familiar music prior to completing a task improved working-memory performance. One hundred and nineteen Rwandan participants were randomly assigned to a control group, who read a short story prior to completing the task, or to one of four different musical conditions varying on two dimensions: arousing or relaxing music, or Western or Rwandan music. Working memory was measured using the n-back paradigm, where participants are presented with a sequence of stimuli one by one and need to decide if the current stimulus is the same as one presented previously. The gap between current and previous stimuli can be varied. The greater the distance, the harder the task. The findings showed that there were no positive effects of familiar, pleasant or stimulating music on working memory. Performance on the n-back task tended to improve from before and after listening to music across all conditions, but the improvement was less in participants who listened to familiar Rwandan music compared to those who listened to unfamiliar Western music or to a short story.

In contrast, Silva and colleagues (2020) investigated the impact of music on episodic memory. Two potential enhancers of music effects—stopping music before task performance to eliminate music-related distraction, and using preferred music to maximise reward—were adopted. The main study included a sample of 51 healthy younger adults, while a pilot study was conducted with 12 older adults, divided into those classified as low- versus high-functioning according to cognitive performance on a screening test. There was strong evidence that music had no advantage in relation to episodic memory over silence or environmental sounds in younger adults. Preferred music had no advantage either. Among the older adults, low- but not high-functioning participants’ item memory was improved by music, particularly by non-preferred music compared to silence. The findings suggest that, in healthy adults, music played prior to a task may be less effective than background music in episodic memory enhancement despite decreased distraction, possibly because reward becomes irrelevant when music is stopped before the task begins. Low-functioning older participants may relate to prior-to-task auditory stimulation in deviant ways when it comes to episodic memory enhancement. Overall, for episodic memory, the arousal, mood or reward effects usually afforded by music played in the background (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Ferreri and Verga, 2016; Salimpoor et al., 2013; Schellenberg, 2005) may be lost or attenuated when music is stopped before the task begins. Given that preference also had null effects, and preference is strongly linked to reward, it is possible that reward may be a key factor. Music-related reward may no longer favour episodic memory if music is stopped before the task begins. Gilleta and colleagues (2003) studied gender differences working with 26 females and 26 males, who completed a paper folding and cutting task and a mental rotation task following a listening condition (in which a Mozart piano sonata was played or participants sat in silence). A statistically significant three-way interaction among gender, listening condition and task indicated that an effect was present only for female participants on the mental rotations task.

Exploring the differential effects of breaks filled with diverse activities, as is common in everyday life, Kuschpel and colleagues (2015) exposed young adults to breaks involving eyes-open resting, listening to music or playing the video game Angry Birds before performing an n-back working memory task. Playing the Angry Birds video game during a short learning break led to a decline in task performance over the course of the task, as compared to eyes-open resting and listening to music, although overall task performance was not impaired. This effect was associated with high levels of daily mind-wandering and low self-reported ability to concentrate.

Working with children with learning difficulties, Gregoire (1984) focused on the impact of prior listening to music on concentration in subsequent performance on a matching-numbers classroom task with 17 six- to eleven-year-old children. The intervention condition consisted of a brief taped story illustrated on a felt board, a rest period with relaxing music, and five minutes of individual number-matching. The control condition was identical but without the music. There were no significant differences overall, although the older participants exhibited significantly fewer behavioural issues during the music period than during the rest phase.

Overall, the evidence for the priming benefits of music on cognitive tasks is inconclusive. There is some evidence that musical neurological priming can directly enhance performance on spatial reasoning tasks, as proposed by Rauscher and colleagues, although the evidence for this is not consistent. Music can also have priming effects relating to arousal or mood, which may affect performance on a variety of tasks in a range of different ways. To begin to understand these mixed findings, there needs to be a greater focus on the underlying neural priming processes.

Background Music

There is now a substantial body of research which has examined the impact of background music on performance on a range of cognitive tasks in individuals across the lifespan. Music has also been used as a stimulus for creative writing, but this practice needs to be distinguished from music being played as a background to studying (Donlan, 1976). During the 1950s, as radio became more commonplace, concerns were raised as it was feared that listening to the radio while completing homework would negatively affect children’s learning. Early studies addressing these issues were not always well controlled, and many did not specify the type of music being played or the nature of the task being undertaken. This made interpreting the findings extremely difficult. The remainder of the chapter is divided into sections which will outline the research, providing more detailed evidence relating to:

• the nature of the music played, including preferred music, familiarity, liking and preference for music of one’s own culture;
• the nature of the task to be completed, including memory, attention, reading comprehension, second-language learning and English as a second language;
• individual differences, including musical expertise, gender, personality and metacognition;
• children’s behaviour and task performance, including primary-school children and older students;
• children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, ADHD and developmental difficulties;
• older adults and those with cognitive impairment;
• reviews and meta-analyses; and
• explaining the impact of background music on cognitive performance, including an explanatory framework.

The research has been categorised in relation to its main focus, although any single research project may have outcomes related to more than one outcome.

The Nature of the Music

Some research has ignored the characteristics of the music being played, assuming that all music would have a similar impact. For instance, Cockerton and colleagues (1997) simply compared music with no music in a repeated measures design with 30 undergraduates who completed two cognitive tests: one in silence and the other with background music. The students completed more questions and answered more questions correctly when music was playing, although there was no difference in the heart rate of those participating in each condition. Some attempts have been made to address issues relating to the nature of the music by differentiating music on the basis of genre, its perceived potential to stimulate or relax, whether it is vocal or instrumental, and its cognitive complexity. Despite this, such categorisations do not always capture the complexity of music as it is listened to. This particularly applies to Western classical music with its frequent changes of mood, tempo, timbre and volume. To examine the issues further, some research has investigated how exposing participants to different types of music affected their performance on various cognitive tasks. Control groups have listened to music from other genres or spoken text rather than sitting in silence. In an early detailed study in the USA, Henderson and colleagues (1945) explored the effect of music on the reading efficiency of 50 first-year female undergraduates. Participants were divided into three equally matched groups on the basis of psychological examination and reading test scores. One group listened to popular music while completing reading tasks, another classical music, while the third worked in silence. The participants completed a questionnaire which determined whether they were accustomed to studying with the radio on, whether or not they thought that the radio reduced their study efficiency, the amount of studying done with the radio on and the type of programme that they usually listened to when studying. The popular music used was ‘Two O’Clock Jump’, Harry James; ‘That’s What You Think’, Krupa; ‘Sunday, Monday, or Always’, Frank Sinatra; ‘Mr. Five by Five’, Harry James; ‘Prince Charming’, Harry James; ‘Tuxedo Junction’, Glenn Miller; ‘Idaho’, Benny Goodman; ‘Crosstown’, Glenn Miller; and ‘Close to You’, Frank Sinatra. The classical music was ‘Symphony in D Minor’ by Cesar Franck. The tests were administered on three successive afternoons. The participants were asked to assume that they were in their own rooms studying with the radio on. The differences between the averages of the pre-test scores and the final test scores of each group were calculated and the significance of the averages analysed. The findings showed that the popular music acted to distract the students on paragraph comprehension but not on the vocabulary test. The classical music had no negative impact on either test. The authors explained the results in terms of the simpler rhythms and melodies of popular music being easily understood, and therefore listened to, by the participants, diverting their attention from the task in hand. They argued that the classical music was likely to be perceived as vague and not listened to, just providing a background against which the assigned task was accomplished without interference. The popular music may have had a greater impact on the comprehension task, as this task was more complex and required sustained effort, while the vocabulary materials were intermittent and unrelated. Overall, the authors concluded that whether or not music is a real distraction depends on the complexity of the music and the complexity of the test materials. There were no significant differences depending on whether students were accustomed to studying with the radio playing. Also using reading comprehension as the outcome measure, Thompson and colleagues (2012) manipulated changes in tempo and intensity to create four conditions: slow low-intensity, slow high-intensity, fast low-intensity, and fast high-intensity. In each condition, 25 participants were given four minutes to read a passage, followed by three minutes to answer six multiple-choice questions. Baseline performance was established by having control participants complete the reading task in silence. A significant tempo-by-intensity interaction was observed, with comprehension in the fast high-intensity condition falling significantly below baseline. These findings demonstrated that listening to background instrumental music was most likely to disrupt reading comprehension when the music was fast and loud. Similarly, Chou and colleagues (2010), working with 133 Taiwanese college students, studied whether light classical music was more or less distracting than hip-hop music or silence during a comprehension task. The findings showed that music with higher intensity was more distracting and had a greater effect on task performance and concentration.

Yang and colleagues (2016) conducted two experiments: the first tested for differences in perception of distractibility between tonal and atonal music, while the second tested how tonal music and atonal music affected visual working memory by comparing musicians and non-musicians who were placed in contexts with background tonal music, atonal music or silence. Participants were instructed to complete a delayed matching memory task. The results showed that musicians and non-musicians had different evaluations of the distractibility of tonal and atonal music, possibly indicating that long-term training may lead to a higher auditory-perception threshold among musicians. For the working memory task, musicians reacted faster than non-musicians in all background music cases, although the musicians took more time to respond in the tonal background music condition than in the other conditions. The results suggest that, for a visual memory task, background tonal music may occupy more cognitive resources than atonal music or silence for musicians, leaving few resources left for the memory task. Despite this, the musicians outperformed the non-musicians. Similarly, Tze and Chou (2010) explored whether different types of background music affected the performance of a reading comprehension task in 133 Taiwanese college students. The study explored whether listening to music affected the learners’ concentration on a reading task and also whether light classical music was more or less distracting than hip-hop music or silence. The findings showed that music with higher intensity was more distracting, and had a greater effect on task performance and concentration.

Using two contrasting tasks, Angel and colleagues (2010) assessed the effects of fast-tempo music on cognitive performance among 56 male and female university students. A linguistic processing task and a spatial processing task were selected to assess verbal and non-verbal performance. Ten excerpts from Mozart’s compositions, matched for tempo, were selected to be played in the background. The music increased the speed of spatial processing and the accuracy of linguistic processing. Focusing on performance on arithmetic tasks, Dolegui (2013) used different genres of music, played at different volumes. Thirty-two undergraduate students, ranging in age from 20 to 41 years old, participated on a voluntary basis. Five different arithmetic tests were used, consisting of 20 different operations of similar difficulty: five multiplication, five division, five addition and five subtraction problems. Loud music was defined as heavy rock metal music represented by the song ‘Not Ready to Die’, Demon Hunters. Soft music was defined as classical piano music, ‘Morning Light’, Beeson. All participants were exposed to all five conditions. The first test was conducted with soft music at low intensity, the second with loud music at low intensity, the third in complete silence. The fourth and fifth tests were conducted with soft and loud music. The tests were graded for accuracy. Performance scores were significantly higher in silence than in all four music conditions, intensity levels and types of music combined, although overall, performance was significantly worse in the presence of loud music at high intensity. Similarly, Cassidy and MacDonald (2007) investigated the effects of music with high arousal potential and negative affect, music with low arousal potential and positive affect, and everyday noise on the cognitive task performance of introverts and extroverts. Forty participants completed five cognitive tasks: immediate recall, free recall, numerical and delayed recall, and the Stroop test. Ten participants completed each of these tasks in one of the four sound conditions: high arousal and negative affect, low arousal and positive affect, everyday noise, and silence. Participants were also assessed for levels of introversion and extroversion, and reported their preferences for music versus noise while studying. Performance was lessened across all cognitive tasks in the presence of background sound, music or noise, compared to silence. The two music conditions produced differential distraction effects, with performance on all tasks being poorer in the presence of high-arousal, negative-affect music as compared with low-arousal, positive-affect music and silence. Performance was moderated by internal arousal, with introverts performing better overall on each task except the Stroop test, and appearing to be more detrimentally affected by the presence of high arousal negative affect music and noise.

Some research has focused on the differential impact of vocal and instrumental music. For instance, Jäncke and colleagues (2014) studied 226 participants who were randomly assigned to one of five groups, who all completed a verbal learning task. One group served as a control group, working in silence, while four further groups were exposed to vocal or instrumental music during learning, with different subjective intensity and valence. The four music listening conditions were vocal or instrumental music, each with high or low intensity. As the high and low intensity groups did not differ in terms of their rated intensity during the main experiment, these groups were put together. This reduced the sample to three groups: a control group, one listening to vocal music and one listening to instrumental music. Recall of the number of learned words was assessed immediately, after 15 minutes and 14 days later. Verbal learning improved across the recall sessions without any strong differences between the control and experimental groups. Exposure to vocal or instrumental background music during encoding did not influence verbal learning.

Adopting a neuroscientific approach, Nemati and colleagues (2019) investigated the neural correlates of pleasure induced by listening to highly pleasant and neutral musical excerpts using electroencephalography. Analysis of the data showed a distinct gradual change in the power of low-frequency oscillations in response to highly pleasant, but not neutral, musical excerpts. Correlation analysis between behavioural and electrophysiological data revealed that theta power was correlated with subjective assessment of pleasantness. To study the link between attention and positive valence, volunteers performed a delayed match-to-sample memory task while listening to the musical excerpts. Performance was significantly lower under highly pleasant conditions compared to neutral conditions. Listening to pleasant music required high degrees of attention, leading to an observed decline in memory performance. Gradual development of low-frequency oscillations in the frontal and posterior areas may be at least partly due to gradual recruitment of higher levels of attention over time in response to pleasurable music.

Exploring the impact of music on a simple perceptual motor task, Nittono and colleagues (2000) compared the performance of 24 undergraduates on a self-paced line-tracing task with fast or slow classical music or metronome tones in the background. The findings showed that fast music accelerated performance compared with slow music, whereas the tempo of the metronome tones did not affect performance. Similarly, Bottiroli and colleagues (2014) measured how different types of music affected performance on a processing-speed task using no music, white noise, music with positive emotion and high arousal levels (Mozart), or music with negative mood and lower arousal (Mahler). Performance on the processing-speed task improved when listening to Mozart. However, when participants were faced with free-recall and phonemic-fluency tasks, Mahler’s music provided the most beneficial conditions. Both types of music were advantageous over white noise or silence for both types of task. In a real-life simulation, Kallinen (2002) studied the effects of the tempo of background music on reading business news in a crowded cafeteria environment. There were three conditions: no music, or fast or slow music. The findings suggested that the type of music (or silence) significantly affected reading performance and the emotional evaluation of the news content. Men evaluated the news most positively in the slow-music condition, whereas women evaluated the news most positively in the no-music condition. Reading rate and efficiency were significantly lower in the slow-music group than in the fast-music group. Also simulating a real-life situation, Mayfield and Moss (1989) undertook two studies to evaluate the effect of music tempo on task performance. In the first study, 44 undergraduate business students were asked to be workers in a stock-market project by collecting closing stock prices and calculating the percentage of change in the price from week to week. Participants were randomly divided into groups, such that they either listened to fast or slow-paced music while they worked, or to no music. The quantity and quality of work was assessed using music-listening habits as a covariate. There were no statistically significant differences between the performance of the two groups. In the second study, the students completed the same task under the same conditions. In this study, the women performed significantly better than the men and performance was significantly higher in a rock-music condition than in a heartbeat condition, although participants in the rock-music condition perceived a higher level of distraction.

Preferred Music, Familiarity and Liking

One strand of research has explored whether participants’ familiarity, preference or liking for background music has an impact on task outcomes. For instance, Hilliard and Tolin (1979) studied the effect of familiarity with background music on the performance of 64 undergraduates on simple and difficult reading comprehension tasks. Unsurprisingly, scores on easier sections were higher than on difficult sections, while overall scores were higher when familiar music was playing. In a series of studies, Perham and colleagues explored issues relating to preferred and different types of music. Perham and Vizard (2011) tested serial recall under quiet, liked and disliked music conditions, as well as steady-state and changing-state speech. The findings showed that performance was poorer for both music conditions and the changing-state speech, compared to quiet and steady-state speech conditions. The findings suggested that musical preference did not affect serial recall performance. Similarly, Perham and Sykora (2012) asked participants to serially recall eight item lists in either quiet, liked or disliked music conditions. Performance was poorer when music was played compared with quiet, and in the liked as opposed to the disliked music condition. In addition, participants were inaccurate in perceiving their performance to be roughly equivalent in each of the music conditions when liked music exhibited more task impairment than disliked music. Changing the task to reading comprehension, Perham and Currie (2014) studied 30 undergraduate students, ranging in age from 19 to 65. The background music adopted included disliked lyrical music, thrash metal, liked lyrical music, non-lyrical music, and quiet. The thrash metal music selected were Death’s Angel’s ‘Seemingly Endless Time’ and ‘The Ultra Violence’. Students who reported liking this genre were omitted from the study. Liked music was selected by the students themselves and included music by One Direction, Frank Ocean and Katy Perry. In the study, participants were told not to attend to the music which they listened to on headphones. A short questionnaire was administered to participants upon completion, which comprised Likert-scale questions that asked participants to rate how likeable, familiar and distracting each sound condition was, as well as how well they thought that they performed in each condition. Students read four passages of text and then answered six multiple-choice questions on each. Reading comprehension performance was greatest for the quiet and non-lyrical music conditions and poorest for the two lyrical music conditions. Participants perceived themselves to have performed best in the liked lyrical, the quiet and the non-lyrical conditions, as well as feeling that they were the most familiar experiences for them. They felt that the liked and disliked lyrical conditions were most distracting to performance, with quiet being much less distracting. It seems that, in the case of reading comprehension and category recall, there is a conflict in processing, as participants attempt to process task-related information and background sound simultaneously.

Chew and colleagues (2016) recruited 165 undergraduate students with a mean age of almost 22 years old who completed arithmetic, reading comprehension and word-memory tasks while exposed to familiar or unfamiliar, foreign or first-language music, or no music. There was a significant impact on the word-memory task for the familiarity of the music, but not in relation to whether it was in a foreign or first language. Overall, depending on the task, familiarity but not the language of the music affected learning and task performance when compared to a no-music condition. Similarly, Sutton and Lowis (2008) studied the effect of musical mode on verbal and spatial task performance. Forty-eight participants completed written verbal and spatial reasoning tests while a piece of music in a major key by Handel was played, and again when the same piece was digitally manipulated to create a version in the minor mode. The findings showed that the music in the major mode was rated more emotionally positive by both sexes than that in the minor mode. Females scored higher than males in performance on the verbal tasks when this was significantly enhanced with the major-mode music, while males scored higher than the females on spatial reasoning when the music was in the major mode.

Smith and Morris (1977) studied the effects of sedative and stimulative music on memory performance, anxiety and concentration. Sixty undergraduate students were exposed to one of five types of music: classical, jazz and blues, country bluegrass, easy listening and rock music. Participants indicated their preferred genre and were requested to repeat a set of numbers backwards while listening to either stimulative, sedative or no music. They were asked about their concerns about the test, their emotionality or physiological affective arousal, their ability to concentrate, their expectations of their performance, and whether they liked or disliked the music. Compared with sedative music, stimulative music increased worry scores, interfered with concentration and resulted in lower performance expectancies. Participants performed best in the no-music condition and worst while listening to their preferred music, with performance to sedative music being between these extremes. The authors argued that preferred music may serve to distract when trying to complete a demanding task, perhaps because fewer cognitive resources are available when attention is drawn to the lyrics, emotions and memories that music can evoke. Complex interactive effects on task performance were reported, suggesting that the effects of music need to be understood in terms of cognitive processes rather than primarily on the basis of physiological affective responses to musical stimuli. Another explanation for the advantage of preferred music is that it is rewarding (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Ferreri and Verga, 2016). Reward may be one additional mechanism underpinning the positive effects of music on cognition (Ferreri and Verga, 2016).

Preference for Music of One’s Own Culture

Preference for music is predominantly determined by an individual’s cultural background. For instance, a preference for Indian classical music over Western classical music is seen in Indians from an average socioeconomic background (Schafer et al., 2012). Each individual’s way of responding to music is influenced by their liking and preference for that music. For instance, Mohan and Thomas (2020) explored the effect of background music on the performance of 34 Indian adolescents aged 13 to 14 on their comprehension of words and sentences in English. Participants with average verbal ability and a preference for the Indian music comprised the final sample. Two types of music were used: Indian classical music (Raga Shanmukhapriya)—which is said to induce a sense of calm and increase concentration—and Mozart’s Symphony No. 35. The findings revealed that playing music in the background resulted in a significant increase in adolescents’ performance on the reading comprehension task. The effect was greater when Indian classical music was played, highlighting the importance of culture. Similarly, Kasiri, (2015) studied the impact of non-lyrical Iranian traditional music on the reading comprehension performance of Iranians learning to speak English. Sixty English-as-a-foreign-language learners completed two 50-itemed reading comprehension tests in no-music as well as background-music condition. The results revealed a negative influence of music on reading comprehension.

The Nature of the Task To Be Completed

In addition to research focusing on different types of music, a variety of different tasks have been used—for instance, those related to various different kinds of memory, tasks requiring high levels of attention, reading comprehension and learning a second language.

Background Music and Memory

In research relating to memorisation, the findings have differed when music is played concurrently with material which is to be remembered aurally (Furman, 1978), when the task involves paired associate recall (Myers, 1979) or phonological short-term memory (Salame & Baddeley, 1989), or when recall is of written sentences presented visually (Hallam et al., 2002). Where background music is vocal in nature, it may have a greater negative impact on reading comprehension and other literacy tasks (Martin et al., 1988). Some research has focused on visual memory, where it might be expected that there would be less interference from the music. For instance, Chraif and colleagues (2014) studied the influence of relaxing music on an abstract visual short-term memory retrieval task. Sixty-eight undergraduate students, aged between 19 and 23 years old, participated. The findings showed that listening to relaxing music had a significant positive effect in increasing the number of correct abstract forms recognised.

Nguyen and Grahn (2017) examined the effect of background music on different types of memory. One hypothesis for the impact of background music on memory is that it modulates mood and arousal, creating optimal levels to enhance memory performance. Another hypothesis is that background music establishes a context that, when reinstated, cues memory performance. The researchers presented music during study time only, test only and both. They also assessed how mood, arousal and context affected performance on recall, recognition and associative memory tasks. Participants recalled more words when they listened to low-arousal music than high-arousal music, regardless of mood or whether context was consistent between study and test. For recognition memory, participants also recognised more words when they listened to low-arousal music than high-arousal music, but only when the music was negative. For associative memory, no significant effects of mood, arousal or context were found on recognition of previously studied word pairs. Across all elements of the research, background music (compared with silence) did not significantly improve verbal memory performance. While mood and arousal affected recall and recognition memory, overall background music did not enhance memory.

Jäncke and Sandmann (2010) used musical excerpts which were specifically composed for the research to ensure that they were unknown to the participants. They were designed to vary in tempo (fast versus slow) and consonance (in tune versus out of tune). Noise was used as a control stimulus. Seventy-five participants were randomly assigned to one of five groups and learned verbal material (non-words with and without semantic connotation, and with and without background music). Each group was exposed to one of five different background stimuli: in-tune fast music, in-tune slow, out-of-tune fast, out-of-tune slow and noise. There was no substantial or consistent influence of background music on verbal learning. However, there were differences in EEG measurements after word presentation for the group exposed to in-tune fast music while they learned the verbal material, and for the group exposed to out-of-tune fast music after word presentation. Although there were different cortical activations in response to the music, these did not relate to behavioural outcomes.

In an unusual study, Liu and colleagues (2012) studied the recognition processes of Chinese characters in background music. Real Chinese characters, upright or rotated, were used as target stimuli, while pseudowords were used as background stimuli. Participants were required to detect real characters while listening to Mozart’s Sonata K. 448 or in silence. The findings showed that the music mainly served as a distracter in the recognition processes of real Chinese characters. The impact was greater for the real than the rotated characters.

Some research has focused on episodic memory for verbal materials. Generally, the effects of music are positive (Ferreri et al., 2013; 2014; 2015) and tend to be consistent across younger and older adults (Ferreri et al., 2015). Music facilitates the encoding of printed verbal materials not only when music is compared to a silent context, but also when compared to non-musical auditory contexts, such as environmental sounds or noise. Music has a specific effect rather than a general advantage related to sound.

Other research has extended the range of tasks explored. For instance, Fassbender (2012) explored the use of background music on game technology and its effect on learning. A virtual history lesson was presented to participants with different background stimuli—music or no music—to test the effect of music on memory. To test the role of immersion on memory and its possible relationship to the music, two different display systems (a three-monitor display system or an immersive reality centre) were used. Overall, participants remembered a significantly higher number of facts using the three-monitor display system, particularly if no background music was played. Similarly, Richards and colleagues (2008) studied the benefits of immersive virtual worlds as a learning environment, and the role that music plays within these environments. They investigated whether background music of the genre typically found in computer-based roleplaying games had an effect on learning in a computer-animated history lesson about the Macquarie Lighthouse within an immersive virtual world. In the first experiment, musical stimuli were created from four different computer-game soundtracks. Seventy-two undergraduate students watched the presentation and completed a survey including biographical details, questions on the historical material presented and questions relating to their perceived level of immersion. While the tempo and pitch of the music was unrelated to learning, music conditions resulted in a higher number of accurately remembered facts than the no-music condition. One soundtrack, in particular, showed a statistically significant improvement in memorisation of facts over the other music conditions. There was also an interaction between the levels of perceived immersion and ability to accurately remember facts. The second experiment involved 48 undergraduate students. The soundtrack that had been most successful in Experiment One (Oblivion) was used again with a silent condition. In this experiment, the participants completed the tasks under both conditions. Only one version of the tempo and pitch manipulations was used: slow tempo, low pitch. The effect of different display systems on feelings of immersion was tested. Half the participants watched the computer-animated history lesson in a cone display system and the other half was allocated to a three-monitor display system on a computer desk. There were no statistically significant differences between the music and no-music conditions. However, the three-monitor display system led to enhanced memory performance. Similarly, Linek and colleagues (2011) investigated the influence of background music within an educational adventure game on motivational and cognitive variables. The results suggested that the music had a high motivational potential. As neither positive nor negative effects on learning were detected, background music may be considered as a motivating design element of educational games.

Using piped music, Langan and Sachs (2013) explored the impact of piping music into an information literacy classroom on student engagement and retention of information literacy concepts. The findings from this study indicated positive relationships between background music and student comfort, confidence and retention. Similarly, Musliu and colleagues (2017) researched whether music could help in the memorisation of different materials, for instance, nonsense syllables, numbers and poems with rhyme. Seventy-four students aged between 17 and 22 years participated. The experiment included four different tests. The first included 50 nonsense syllables. Following this, students were separated into three groups, each with similar outcomes on performance in the first test. The first group took subsequent tests in silence, the second while listening to music with lyrics and the third listening to relaxing music. The students were given five minutes to memorise 50 different nonsense syllables,12 lines from poems and 50 different orders of numbers. They then wrote down what they could remember. The music was the same during the memorising and writing phases. There were significant differences in memorising between students with or without music, in favour of those learning in silence.

Adopting a neuroscientific approach, Ferreri and colleagues (2013) addressed the debate about the link between music and memory for words—in particular, whether music specifically benefits the encoding element of verbal memory tasks by providing a richer context for encoding and, therefore, less demand on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Twenty-two healthy young adults were subjected to functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging of their bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while encoding words in the presence of either a musical or silent background. Behavioural data confirmed the facilitating effect of background music during encoding on subsequent item recognition. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging results revealed significantly greater activation of the left hemisphere during encoding and a sustained, bilateral decrease of activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the music condition compared to silence. These findings suggest that music modulates the role played by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during dorsolateral prefrontal cortex verbal encoding and opens up the possibility for applications in clinical populations with prefrontal impairments, such as elderly adults or Alzheimer’s patients. In a later study, Ferreri and colleagues (2015) investigated whether verbal episodic memory could be improved by background instrumental music. Twenty young adults were asked to memorise different lists of words presented against a background of music, environmental sounds or silence. Their episodic memory performance was then tested in terms of item and source-memory scores. The findings revealed better memory performance under the music condition than with environmental sounds or silence in retrieval. These findings indicate that music can specifically act as a facilitating encoding context for verbal episodic memory, which may have implications for music as a rehabilitation tool for episodic memory deficits. Further, Ferreri and colleagues (2015)—based on functional near-infrared spectroscopy imaging studies on music, episodic encoding and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—monitored the entire lateral prefrontal cortex during both encoding and retrieval of verbal material. Nineteen participants were asked to encode lists of words presented with either background music or silence, and were subsequently tested during a free-recall task. Meanwhile, their prefrontal cortex was monitored using a 48-channel functional near-infrared spectroscopy system. Behavioural results showed greater chunking of words under the music condition, suggesting the employment of associative strategies for items encoded with music. The functional near-infrared spectroscopy results showed that music provided a less demanding way of modulating both episodic encoding and retrieval, with general prefrontal decreased activity under the music versus silence condition. This suggests that music-related memory processes rely on specific neural mechanisms, and that music can positively influence both episodic encoding and retrieval of verbal information.

Background Music and Attention

There has been considerable research on the impact of music on attention. For instance, Jiang and colleagues (2011) investigated the influence of mood on attentional networks in a normal population. Participants performed an attention-network test, which provided functional measures of alerting, orienting and executive attention. Positive or negative mood was induced by listening to music with a positive or negative valence; neutral mood was induced by reading a collection of basic facts about China. The results revealed that negative mood led to a significantly higher alerting efficiency relative to other moods, while there were no significant mood effects on orienting or executive attention efficiency. Specifically, the increase in the alerting function during negative mood states may be due to the modulation effect of negative mood on the noradrenergic system, and/or to the survival benefit resulting from an increase in automatic vigilance towards negative information.

Another strand of work has been concerned with the impact of music on attentional control—an executive function that allows an individual to focus attention on a specific stimulus, while inhibiting distractors from the environment. For instance, Fernandez and colleagues (2020) reported improved perceptual judgment in young adults on a flanker task (where individuals have to respond to one letter in a group and ignore others) when joyful and arousing or sad and tender music was playing, or they sat in silence. There was no overall effect of background music on attentional control performance per se. Similarly, Burkhard and colleagues (2018) studied the influence of background music on executive functions, particularly inhibitory functions. Participants completed a standardised go/no go task during three conditions: no background music or relaxing or exciting background music. EEG was recorded along with reaction times, omissions and commissions. Event-related potentials revealed no differences between the three conditions in reaction times, omissions or commissions. The findings suggested that background music had no detrimental effects on the performance of a go/no go task and its neural underpinnings. Using a visuo-spatial flanker task, Cloutier and colleagues (2020) studied 19 older and 21 younger adults during three auditory conditions: stimulating music, relaxing music and silence. Participants had to indicate as fast and as accurately as possible the direction of a central arrow, which was flanked by congruent or incongruent arrows. As expected, reaction times were slower for the incongruent compared to congruent trials. This difference was significantly greater under the relaxing-music condition compared to other auditory conditions, for both age groups. Focusing on the impact of mood on attention, Shih and colleagues (2012) studied 102 participants, aged 20 to 24, on concentration and attention with music, with and without lyrics. The findings revealed that background music with lyrics had significant negative effects on concentration and attention. In a later study, Shih and colleagues (2016) studied 75 adults, ranging in age from 20 to 24, who completed an attention test and emotion questionnaire. The findings showed that background music with lyrics adversely impacted attention performance more than that without lyrics. The listeners also self-reported feeling loved while music was playing.

Adopting a neuroscientific approach, using Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Leigh (2013) explored the consequence of music exposure on cognitive event-related potentials. Seventeen participants performed a three-stimulus visual oddball task, where a set of the same stimuli were presented with one different stimulus at various points, the oddball, while event-related potentials were recorded. Participants were required to differentiate between a rare target stimulus, a rare novel stimulus and a frequent non-target stimulus. During task performance, participants listened to the four Vivaldi concertos—‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’—and experienced a silent control condition. The research also examined the impact of different tempi. The data revealed that ‘Spring’, particularly the first movement, enhanced mental alertness and brain measures of attention and memory. Similarly, Du and colleagues (2020) used event-related potentials to examine the effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension and their modulation by musical arousal. Thirty-nine postgraduates judged the correctness of sentences about world knowledge without or with high or low arousal background music. The results showed that the effect elicited by world knowledge violations versus correct controls, was significantly smaller for silence than for high and low arousal-music backgrounds, with no significant difference between the two musical backgrounds.

Reading Comprehension

As reading plays such an important role in the lives of many people, considerable research has used reading comprehension as a task in studies of the impact of background music. For instance, DeMers (1996) compared two classes on their reading prior to the onset of the study to establish equity of performance. The experimental group also practised prior to the study, with Mozart’s Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 playing in the background for several weeks prior to the study to familiarise themselves with working to music. Both groups also practiced undertaking a test prior to the experiment. The findings showed that the group with background music performed significantly better on the reading comprehension test. Similarly, Cooper and colleagues (2008) gave participants three different reading comprehension tests in three different conditions: no music, classical music and lyrical music. The results showed slightly better performance on the reading comprehension test in the no-music condition, but this difference was not statistically significant. In a similar study, Liapis and colleagues (2008) tested the impact of lyrical and non-lyrical music on reading comprehension. Participants in the non-lyrical condition performed better than the other group, although this difference was not statistically significant. Drowns (2002) focused on the effect of classical background music on silent reading comprehension and found an improvement with music in the background, while Harmon and colleagues (2008) showed that there was no significant difference among the three groups who either listened to rock music, Mozart or worked in silence on a reading comprehension test. Martin and colleagues (1988) carried out a series of studies, the first of which demonstrated that speech but not music interfered with reading comprehension, while music had a greater interfering effect than speech on a music identification task. Two further experiments showed that the detrimental effect of the speech background on reading was due to their semantic rather than their phonological properties.

Adopting a different approach Zhang, and colleagues (2018) examined how listening to music affected eye movements when college students read for comprehension. Two studies found that the effects of music depended on word frequency and musical dynamics. The first showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of looking times, even when listening to music. However, when exposed to music, readers spent more time rereading, and gaze duration on words with very low frequency was less predicted by word length, suggesting disrupted sub-lexical processing. A second study showed that these effects were exacerbated for a short time as soon as a new song was played. The results showed that word recognition was generally unaffected despite music exposure and that extensive rereading could, to some extent, compensate for any disruption.

Second-Language Learning

A further area of interest has been second-language learning. Kang and Williamson (2014) examined the effect of background music on participants taking a beginners’ course on a CD in either Mandarin Chinese or Arabic. Groups matched on age, gender, verbal intelligence, musical training and working memory ability were randomly assigned to a CD that contained accompanying music or no music. Individuals who chose to learn Chinese performed better on all outcome tests compared to those who learned Arabic. Within the Chinese learners, those who received music CDs performed significantly better on tests of recall and translation compared to those who received no music CDs. No music effects were observed in the Arabic learners or on pronunciation ability in Chinese.

Küssner and Hillen (2016) investigated individual differences in the effects of background music on foreign-vocabulary learning. They predicted that individuals with a high level of cortical arousal should perform worse when learning with background music compared to silence, whereas individuals with a low level of cortical arousal would be unaffected by background music or may even benefit from it. Participants were tested on a paired associate learning paradigm consisting of three immediate word recall tasks, as well as a delayed recall task one week later. Baseline cortical arousal assessed with spontaneous EEG measurement in silence prior to the learning sessions was used for the analysis. The findings revealed no interaction between cortical arousal and the learning condition with background music versus silence. However, there was a main effect of cortical arousal in the beta band on recall, indicating that individuals with high beta power learned more vocabulary than those with low beta power. To substantiate this finding the study was replicated. A combined analysis of data from both experiments suggested that beta power predicted the performance in the word recall task, but that there was no effect of background music on foreign vocabulary learning.

De Groot and Smedinga (2014) studied participants learning foreign-language vocabulary by means of the paired associates method in silence, with vocal music with lyrics in a familiar language playing in the background, or with vocal music with lyrics in an unfamiliar language playing in the background. The vocabulary to be learned varied in concreteness and phonological typicality of the foreign words. When tested during and immediately after training, learning outcomes were poorer in the familiar language music condition than in the unfamiliar language music and silence conditions. This effect was short-lived, as shown in a delayed test one week after training. Learning outcomes were better for concrete words than for abstract words and better for typical foreign forms than for atypical ones.

Studying the impact of background music on writing rather than learning a second language, Cho (2015) also took account of the writer’s-second language proficiency. Twenty-eight students wrote an argumentative essay in music and non-music conditions respectively. The findings were analysed in terms of fluency and writing quality, and showed significant differences in pause frequency between the music and no music conditions. The comparison of high- and low-proficiency groups showed a significant group by condition interaction, indicating marginally different effects of music depending on the writers’ proficiency level.

Background Music and English as a Second Language

In Iran, Khaghaninejad and colleagues (2016) evaluated the effect of classical music (a Mozart sonata) on the reading comprehension performance of Iranian students having had four months of tuition in a private college teaching English. The participants were required to learn reading passages and then take two tests of reading comprehension, either in a music (Mozart) condition or a no-music quiet condition. The music group outperformed those with no background music. Also in Iran, Rashidi and Faham, (2011) studied the effect of classical music on students’ reading comprehension. A standardised text was used and students answered 20 multiple-choice items. Two groups of students, 60 in total, over a period of three months, were taught reading comprehension with a music background or no music. The group taught with a music background outperformed those taught with no music. Similarly, Sahebdel and Khodadust (2014) studied the effect of background music on reading comprehension in Iranian English for foreign-language learners. The participants were 57 Iranian learners between the ages of 14 and 16 in two third-grade high-school classes at pre-intermediate proficiency level. Before the research, experimental and control groups took a reading comprehension. The researchers played Mozart sonatas as background music to the experimental group and asked them to read the passage silently and then answer the reading comprehension questions. The procedure was the same for the control group but with no music. After ten sessions, the students of both groups were asked to take a parallel form of the same reading comprehension test. The findings showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in reading comprehension. Listening to background music while reading silently had a significantly positive effect on the reading comprehension of Iranian learners for whom English was a foreign language.

Individual Differences

Research taking account of individual differences has taken account of personality, musical expertise, gender and metacognition.

Musical Expertise

Some research has considered whether having musical expertise makes a difference to the possible enhancing or detrimental effects of music. For instance, Darrow and colleagues (2006) explored whether music compromised selective attention differently in those who were majoring in music to non-music majors. Eighty-seven undergraduate and graduate students participated. They were required to bring to the study music that they typically listened to while driving, studying or engaged in other activities. The music brought represented all musical periods and styles. Participants completed a test of attention under alternating music and no music conditions. There were no significant effects for non-music majors; however, music majors who heard the music first completed significantly fewer total items in the following non-music condition, and music majors who listened to instrumental music completed significantly more total items than those who listened to music with vocals. Overall, the findings showed that participants processed significantly more items under the music condition, and music majors processed significantly more items than non-music majors. There were no significant differences based on music or no music in relation to the number of errors made, the number of items processed minus errors, or concentration performance. However, there were differences for the three measures based on musical training. Music majors made significantly fewer errors than the non-music majors, processed significantly more items correctly and their concentration performance scores were significantly higher than the non-music majors’ scores.

Similarly, Yang and colleagues (2016) investigated how background music with different instruments affected trained musicians’ performance on cognitive tasks. Participants completed three sets of cognitively demanding intelligence tests in a design where each group listened to a different piece of music, involving their own and other musical instruments. The results showed that musicians’ performance on cognitive tasks was more impaired when listening to music featuring their own instruments than when listening to other instruments.

Patston and Tippett (2011) administered a language comprehension task and a visuospatial search task to 36 expert musicians and 36 matched non-musicians in conditions of silence and piano music played correctly or incorrectly. Musicians performed more poorly on the language comprehension task in the presence of background music compared to silence, but there was no effect of background music on the musicians’ performance on the visuospatial task. In contrast, the performance of the non-musicians was not affected by music on either task. Additionally, the musicians outperformed the non-musicians on both tasks, reflecting either a general cognitive advantage in musicians or enhancement of more specific cognitive abilities (such as processing speed or executive functioning). Similarly, Haning (2016) studied whether background music impaired language comprehension scores in musicians but not in non-musicians. Thirty-five participants with musical training and 15 without musical training completed a 30-item reading comprehension test. Participants completed the test instrument in silence or in the presence of background music. The findings indicated that there was no significant main effect for either music training or the presence of background music, and no significant interaction between the two conditions.

Gold and colleagues (2013) studied dopamine release in the ventral striatum, as this plays a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that people with greater dopamine efficacy better learn to approach rewards, while those with lesser dopamine efficacy better learn to avoid punishments. This research explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Participants from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose a pleasurable and a neutral piece of music from an experimenter-compiled database, and then listened to one or both of these pieces according to pseudo-random group assignment as they performed a reinforcement learning task dependent on dopamine transmission. Participants’ musical backgrounds, as well as typical listening patterns, were assessed. Behaviour for the training and test phases of the learning task was assessed separately. Participants with more musical experience trained better with neutral music and tested better with pleasurable music, while those with less musical experience exhibited the opposite effect. Assessment of results regarding listening behaviours and subjective music ratings indicated that these effects arose from different listening styles: namely, more affective listening in non-musicians and more analytical listening in musicians. In conclusion, musical pleasure was able to influence task performance, and the shape of this effect depended on group and individual factors.

Gender

Palmiero and colleagues (2016) studied gender differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory when background music which was designed to induce positive or negative moods was playing. The findings showed that the positive music group scored significantly higher than other groups and that male participants outperformed females on one task when negative background music was playing.

Personality

Personality factors are implicated in creating optimal arousal levels for completing cognitive tasks. Introverts have higher resting levels of arousal than extroverts and are more susceptible to over-arousal, which impacts on their task performance when there are certain types of background music (Cassidy and MacDonald, 2007). Furnham and colleagues (1999) examined the effects of vocal and instrumental music upon the performance of introverts and extroverts on three cognitive tasks. One hundred and forty-four sixth-form pupils—introverts and extroverts—completed a reading comprehension task, a logic problem and a coding task. An interaction was predicted such that instrumental music would impair and enhance the test performance of introverts and extroverts respectively, and that these effects would be magnified in the vocal music condition. No significant interactions were found, although there was a trend for the introverts to be impaired by the introduction of music to the environment, and extroverts to be enhanced by it, particularly on the reading and coding tasks. A main effect of extroversion was found in the reading comprehension task. There was a condition effect on the logic task, with participants doing best in the presence of instrumental music. Similarly, MacDonald (2013) examined the relationship between music preference and extroversion on complex task performance in a sample of 34 college students. The students were separated into two groups of high and low extroversion. Each participant experienced three different music conditions (preferred, preset and silence) while performing a complex reading comprehension task. The results revealed a significant interaction effect between level of extroversion and music condition. Individuals with higher levels of extroversion performed significantly better listening to preferred music during the complex task compared to silence and a preset music selection. There were no other statistically significant outcomes. Avila and colleagues (2011) investigated the effect of familiar musical distractors on the cognitive performance of introverts and extroverts. Participants completed a verbal, numerical and logic test in three music conditions: vocal music, instrumental music and silence. The findings showed that, during the verbal test, overall performance for all participants was significantly better in silence, suggesting that lyrics interfere with the processing of verbal information. However, no significant music and personality interactions were found.

Dobbs and colleagues (2011) studied the cognitive test performance of introverts and extroverts in the presence of silence, UK garage music and background noise. One hundred and eighteen female secondary-school students carried out three cognitive tests. It was predicted that introverts would perform more badly on all of the tasks than extroverts in the presence of music and noise but, in silence, performance would be the same. A significant interaction was found for all three tasks. It was also predicted that there would be a main effect of background sound. Performance would be worse in the presence of music and noise than silence. The findings confirmed this prediction with one exception.

Furnham and Strbac (2002) extended previous work by examining whether background noise would be as distracting as music. In the presence of silence, background garage music and office noise, 38 introverts and 38 extroverts carried out a reading comprehension task, a prose-recall task and a mental arithmetic task. It was predicted that there would be an interaction between personality and background sound on all three tasks. Introverts would do more badly on all of the tasks than extroverts in the presence of music and noise but, in silence, performance would be the same. A significant interaction was found on the reading comprehension task only, although a trend for this effect was clearly present on the other two tasks. It was also predicted that there would be a main effect for background sound. Performance would be worse in the presence of music and noise than silence. The results confirmed this prediction. These findings support the hypothesis that there is a difference in optimum cortical arousal in introverts and extroverts. Adopting a different approach, Doyle and Furnham (2012) explored the distracting effects of music on the reading comprehension of creative and non-creative individuals. In the presence of musical distraction and silence, 54 individuals participated. No significant interactions were found, although trends indicated that creative individuals performed better than non-creative individuals in the music distraction condition. The creative individuals tended to listen to more music while studying and reported lower distraction levels.

Background Music and Metacognition

The extent to which learners are used to working with music playing in the background may be important in the extent to which it disrupts or enhances their task performance. For instance, Etaugh and Michal, (1975) gave 16 male and 16 female college students tests of reading comprehension which they completed in quiet surroundings or while listening to preferred music. The more frequently students reported studying with music, the less the music impaired their performance. Similarly, Su and Wang (2010) studied the relationship between cognitive memory and background music. According to whether or not the testees were used to listening to background music, the author divided them into two groups. When the participants were exposed to three different music scenes, the impact of different background music on testees’ cognitive memory differed. The results showed that pure pop music disturbed both groups and pure soft music improved the performance of those who were used to background music but hindered those who were not. There were no statistically significant differences between groups under no music conditions. Also taking account of familiarity of working with background music, Crawford and Strapp (1994) used three timed visuospatial and verbal tests undertaken while vocal or instrumental music was playing. Vocal music disrupted performance significantly more than instrumental music on maze-tracing speed and logical reasoning tests. Both vocal music and instrumental music disturbed performance more than no music on an object-number test which assessed associative learning and long-term memory but this was moderated by studying preference. On this test, those who typically did not study with music showed deterioration across conditions from no music, through instrumental music to vocal music, while those who typically studied with music performed no better in the no-music condition than either music condition. Although extroversion was not a significant covariate of performance, those who typically studied with music were more extroverted and reported greater skills in focusing attention during distracting situations and reported less sensitivity to noise in general on a test of noise sensitivity.

Some students may be able to control their responses to music better than others. For instance, Christopher and Shelton (2017) explored whether existing differences in working memory might impact on the outcomes of research looking at the effect of music on working-memory performance. Undergraduate students worked on reading comprehension and mathematics tasks under music and silence conditions, before completing a battery of working-memory capacity assessments. Although music led to a significant decline in performance overall, working-memory capacity moderated this effect in the reading comprehension tasks. This suggests that individuals who are better able to control their attention, as indicated by working-memory capacity, may be protected from music-related distraction when completing certain kinds of academically relevant tasks. In addition to this, performance may be influenced by metacognition (the extent to which participants are aware that the music is interfering with task performance and consciously adopt strategies to prevent this). Kotsopoulou and Hallam (2010) administered rating-scale questionnaires to 600 students in three age groups—12 to 13, 15 to 16 and 20 to 21—from Japan, the UK, Greece and the USA. The questionnaires explored the extent of playing music while studying, the kinds of tasks undertaken when music was played, the perceived effects of music on studying, the characteristics and types of music played, and the factors that influenced the decision to play music. Statistical analysis revealed both commonality and differences in playing music while studying, related to both age and culture. Some tasks were more frequently accompanied by music than others, while students reported being able to make decisions about the impact of background music on their performance on various tasks and taking action to arrange music to support their learning. Competence in managing the use of music so it did not interfere with task performance increased with age.

The Impact of Background Music on Children’s Behaviour and Task Performance

Historically, research on background music in educational contexts has explored the impact on children at different ages, with special educational needs and undertaking a range of different tasks. For instance, in young children there is evidence that arousing music increases activity. For instance, Rieber (1965) studied the activity of five- and six-year-old children in a specially designed playroom under conditions of silence and two types of music (fast and slow). Activity rates were higher during the intervals when music was played, with fast music having the more marked effect. Music did not affect the variability of activity, which showed a steady decline during the time spent in the room. There is also evidence that the type of play may change. For instance, Gunsberg (1991) found that there was an increase in interactive play when arousing music was playing. Ziv and Goshen (2006) explored the effect of sad and happy background music on the interpretation of a story in five- to six-year-old children. The children heard a story with a background of happy, sad or no melody. The findings showed that background music affected children’s interpretation of the story. Happy background music led to positive interpretations, whereas sad background music led to more negative interpretations. The effect of the happy music was stronger than that of sad music.

Koolidge and Holmes (2018) explored the effects of background music on puzzle-assembly task performance in young children. Participants were 87 primarily European-American children aged four to five years old enrolled in early childhood classes. Children were given one minute to complete a 12-piece puzzle task in one of three background music conditions: music with lyrics, music without lyrics and no music. The music selection was ‘You’re Welcome’ from the Disney movie Moana. The findings revealed that children who heard the music without lyrics completed more puzzle pieces than children in either the music-with-lyrics or no-music condition. Background music without distracting lyrics may be beneficial and superior to background music with lyrics for young children’s cognitive performance, even when they are engaged independently in a non-verbal task. Focusing on drawing, Gur (2009) investigated the effect of classical music on the cognitive content of children’s drawings. The sample consisted of 84 six-year-old children from private kindergartens in higher socioeconomic status areas in Ankara in Turkey. The sample was divided into three groups. The first engaged in free drawing while listening to classical music, the second engaged in free drawing with no music and the third group acted as a control. The results showed that there was a positive effect of classical music on the cognitive content of the drawings.

Background Music and Primary-School Children

Mitchell (1949) was interested in the effect of radio programmes on the silent reading achievement of 91 sixth-grade students. At the time of the study, radio had become an integral part of American culture. It seemed pertinent, therefore, to determine whether radio broadcasts had any effect on the ability of pupils to concentrate sufficiently on their studies in order to acquire knowledge and information. Ninety-one students carried out silent reading tests with either a music or a variety radio programme playing in the background, or they worked in silence. Overall, the variety programme disrupted performance more strongly for the boys than the girls. Performance during listening to the music programme was unaffected. In fact, the boys performed slightly better with the music playing. Working in Taiwan, Su and colleagues (2017) tested whether the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos (K. 448) playing in the background impacted on the learning anxiety, reading rates and reading comprehension of students reading e-books. Sixty-two elementary students participated. The findings showed that, when compared with reading without music, the music had a positive effect in reducing learning anxiety and improved the students’ reading rates, reading comprehension and direct process performance. However, the music had a negative effect on the students’ attention when they had to interpret what they had read. This was explained in terms of the music taking up attentional resources which were required for the task.

Working in a school setting, Ivanov and Geake (2003) found some evidence of an impact related to playing Mozart in the background with upper-primary-school-aged children. Scores on a paper-folding task for a class which listened to Mozart during testing were significantly higher than the scores of a control class. A similar result was obtained for another class which listened to Bach during testing. The musical educational experience of the children did not significantly contribute to the variance in scores.

Koppelman and Scott (1995) explored the impact of different kinds of music on children’s writing content. Nineteen students from a second-grade class participated in ten 15-minute writing sessions, accompanied in each session by one type of background music: classical, jazz, popular, country or silence. The writing was analysed for tone, consistency and number of words. The findings showed that students wrote more words under the classical music condition and there were fewer inconsistencies in writing when listening to jazz. Popular music from the top 40 had a significant negative effect on writing, perhaps because the students were familiar with it. Hallam and Godwin (2015) explored the impact of music on creative writing in primary-school children. Children aged ten to eleven were asked to write an exciting story while listening to arousing, calming or no music. They then completed a questionnaire to establish their awareness of the music and its effects. The music appeared to have little effect on basic literacy skills in the children but stories were rated as more exciting when the calming music was playing. The children had little conception of the detrimental effects of the exciting music on their writing.

Mowsesian and Heyer (1973) studied whether music would distract performance in a testing situation. Four groups of participants were randomly assigned to one of four music conditions. The control group experienced optimal testing conditions as defined by accepted standards. Results on arithmetic, spelling and self-concept measures indicated no differences in mean test scores across groups, regardless of the test condition. The authors suggested that, since a variety of noises is a normal part of the environment, music as a distractor was not an issue. Hallam and colleagues (2002), working with primary-school children aged ten to twelve, undertook two studies exploring the effects of music perceived to be calming and relaxing on performance in arithmetic and on a memory task. They found that calming music led to an improvement in children’s performance on memory and mathematics tasks, compared with a no-music condition. Music perceived as arousing, aggressive and unpleasant disrupted performance on the memory task and led to a lower level of reported altruistic behaviour by the children. This suggests that the effects of music on task performance are mediated by arousal and mood rather than directly affecting cognition. Also in the UK, Bloor (2009) administered four tests to three classes in different primary schools, two with music and two with silence, to see if the music had an impact on the behaviour and attainment of the children during testing. The results were then cross-referenced with the children’s self-evaluation of their own musicality, to ascertain if those children who experienced disruption of attainment and behaviour were musicians. The findings suggested that the music may have supported performance on reading tests but conversely disrupted mathematics tests. Batur (2016) formed experimental and control groups of students in the fifth and sixth grades on the basis of scores on Turkish language exams. Overall, 80 students participated (40 from each grade), with half participating in the intervention and half acting as controls. The students were given 20 minutes to write about any subject that they wished. Those in the intervention groups worked with background music playing, while the others worked in silence. The findings showed that those who wrote with music in the background used more words in their essays than the control group and wrote more fluently.

Focusing on task behaviour, Davidson and colleagues (1986) determined the effect of background music on 26 pupils in a fifth-grade science class. The children were observed for 42 class sessions over a period of four months. Observational data were recorded every three minutes. Time series analyses were performed to determine the effects. There was a significant increase in task performance for the male students and for the total class when music was playing, although there was a ceiling effect for females.

Background Music and Older Students

There has been considerable research with high-school students, as this is the age when music is often played while homework is completed. Kiger (1989) studied the effects of music information load on a reading comprehension task. Twenty-seven male and 27 female high-school students read a passage of literature in the presence of silence, or low- or high-information-load music. Comprehension was best in the low-information-load music condition and worst when the high-information-load music was playing. Similarly, Fogelson (1973) explored whether music acted as a distracter on reading. Playing popular instrumental music during a test proved to be distracting and lowered the reading test performance of 14 eighth-grade students. The less able students were more adversely affected than those who were of higher levels of competence.

Hall (1952) studied the effect of background music on the reading comprehension of 278 eighth- and ninth-grade students in study-hall conditions. Almost 58 percent of the 245 students tested, exclusive of the control group, showed an increase in score when the test was administered with background music. The difference in means showed a substantial gain with background music during the first lesson in the morning and during the first and second afternoon lessons. Over 67 percent of the students in these periods showed an increase in score with music background. Also studying reading comprehension, Anderson and Fuller (2010) investigated the effect of lyrical music on the performance of adolescents. A reading comprehension test was administered to 334 seventh- and eighth-grade students in a non-music environment or with accompanying music comprising top hit singles from 2006. Following the music portion of the test, students completed a survey to assess their preference for or against listening to music while studying. The findings showed that performance declined significantly when background music was playing. For students exhibiting a strong preference for listening to music while studying, there was a pronounced detrimental effect on comprehension.

At college level, Taylor and Rowe (2010) focused on assessment in mathematics, specifically trigonometry. During six major tests of trigonometry, 69 students were played music by Mozart. The results were compared to the performance of 59 students who took the same tests with no background music. The results indicated that the students performed significantly better when Mozart was being played as background music during the assessment.

Research with Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, ADHD and Developmental Difficulties

Calming music has a positive impact on the behaviour of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, reducing their stress and anxiety in a variety of settings, although for some children with learning difficulties—for instance with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)—stimulating music is more effective in improving their behaviour, replacing the children’s need for activity and self-stimulation. These differences in response mean that music interventions aimed at changing behaviour need to be tailored to the requirements of specific groups of children.

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder

Music has been used to help reduce hyperactivity in children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (Scott, 1970). Cripe (1986) proposed that rock music could be used as an adjunctive therapy to other more conventional treatments—rock music has the advantage that it can be ‘administered’ without the need for training staff. It was hypothesised that rock music would decrease activity level in children with ADD and increase their attention span. Eight males with ADD, aged six to eight years old, were introduced to rock music in a playroom. Activity level, number of activities, attention span and length of time attending to one task were assessed. The results indicated a statistically significant reduction in the number of motor activities during the music periods within the test sessions, although there were no significant differences regarding attention span.

Pelham and colleagues (2011) examined the effects of music and video on the classroom behaviour, and performance of boys with and without ADHD, as well as the effects of the drug methylphenidate. Forty-one boys with ADHD and 26 controls worked in the presence of no distraction, music or video. Video produced significant distraction, particularly for the boys with ADHD, while music improved their performance. There were individual differences in response to the music such that some boys were adversely affected and others benefited relative to no distractor. In a second study, music and methylphenidate were assessed in an additional 86 boys with ADHD to further examine the music results. In the presence or absence of music, methylphenidate improved performance relative to placebo. Similar individual differences were found as in the first experiment. Similarly, Abikoff and colleagues (1996) evaluated the impact of extra task stimulation on the academic performance of children with ADHD. Twenty boys with ADHD and 20 boys without ADHD worked on an arithmetic task during high stimulation, music, low stimulation, speech, and no stimulation (silence). The music distractors were individualised for each child, and the arithmetic problems were set at each child’s ability level. The non-ADHD young people performed similarly under all three auditory conditions, while the children with ADHD did significantly better under the music condition than speech or silence conditions. However, arithmetic performance was enhanced only for those children with ADHD who were exposed to music as the first condition. Maloy and Peterson (2014) undertook a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of music interventions for children and adolescents with ADHD. The analysis revealed that music interventions were minimally effective as an intervention for increasing task performance.

Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties

Savan (1989; 1999) observed children with behavioural difficulties during science lessons. She suggested that the behaviour of pupils with special educational needs was, in part, resulting from frustration due to lack of physical coordination and the consequent inability to perform manual tasks effectively and efficiently. She investigated the possibility that specific properties of certain Mozart orchestral compositions might, in combination, improve the coordination skills of pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Audio tapes of Mozart orchestral compositions provided a sound stimulus for ten boys aged twelve and over, identified as having special educational needs and emotional and behavioural difficulties. The tapes were then edited in an attempt to establish which musical qualities produced the effects. Measurements of blood pressure, body temperature and pulse rate were taken to establish which sound stimulus had an effect on the physiology and metabolism of the participants. In each case, an improvement in coordination was observed, accompanied by a corresponding drop in physiological measures and an observed improvement in behaviour. Improvements were also observed in cooperation, aggression was reduced during the lessons immediately following the science lessons.

Hallam and Price (1998) studied the effects of providing background music in the classroom on the behaviour and performance on mathematical tasks of ten children aged nine to ten attending a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, who exhibited a high frequency of disruptive behaviour. The music consisted of songs from children’s films and other music which was popular and well known to the children—the music had been previously identified by other children in the school as calming and relaxing. There was a significant improvement in behaviour and mathematics performance for all of the children. The effects were particularly marked for those whose problems were related to constant stimulus-seeking and overactivity.

Reardon and Bell (1970) tested three predictions of the effects of musical stimulation on the activity level of 11 six- to seventeen-year-old institutionalised boys with severe developmental delay. Participants’ activity scores during sedative and stimulating music were compared with levels during silent baseline and non-musical, spoken recording conditions. Fourteen behavioural categories were rated by trained observers during eight hours of observations under each of the four conditions. Activity level varied significantly on the day of the experimental work, suggesting that the novelty of the recordings was a significant factor. Differences in activity due to the conditions tended to confirm the prediction of lower activity levels during the more stimulating music.

Older Adults and those with Cognitive Impairment

There has been increasing interest in the ways in which actively making music and listening to it may help older people, and particularly those with dementia. This section focuses on issues related to background music and learning. For instance, Foster and Valentine (2001) studied elderly individuals with mild to moderate, high-ability or moderate low-ability dementia who answered autobiographical memory questions drawn from three life eras (remote, medium-remote and recent) with backgrounds of familiar music, novel music, cafeteria noise or quiet. Recall was significantly better in the high-ability than the low-ability group, in sound than in quiet, and in music than in noise. Recall was significantly related to life era, declining from remote to recent memory. The superiority of recall with music compared with noise was apparent for recall from remote and medium-remote but not recent eras. The findings may be interpreted in terms of enhanced arousal or attention deployment, and a possible subsidiary role for associative facilitation from the particular music.

Thompson and colleagues (2005) investigated the effect of listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on category fluency in healthy older-adult controls and Alzheimer’s disease patients. Participants completed two one-minute category-fluency tasks whilst listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi and two one-minute category-fluency tasks without music. The findings showed a positive effect of music on category fluency, with performance in the music condition exceeding performance without music in both the healthy older-adult control participants and the Alzheimer’s disease patients. The findings suggested that music enhanced attentional processes in healthy adults and those with Alzheimer’s disease. Irish and colleagues (2006) studied the enhancing effect of music on autobiographical memory recall in ten individuals with mild Alzheimer’s disease and ten healthy elderly matched individuals. Each participant was assessed on two occasions: once in the music condition (listening to ‘Spring’ from Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’) and once in silence. Considerable improvement was found for Alzheimer individuals’ recall on an autobiographical memory in the music condition. There were no differences in terms of overall arousal using galvanic skin response recordings or attentional errors during a sustained attention to response task. A significant reduction in state anxiety was found in the music condition, suggesting that anxiety reduction may be a potential mechanism underlying the enhancing effect of music on autobiographical memory recall. Also using Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Mammarella and colleagues (2007) examined whether listening to music had a positive effect on older adults’ cognitive performance on two working-memory tasks. Participants were presented with the forward version of the digit-span task and phonemic-fluency tests accompanied by classical music, white noise or no music. The classical music significantly increased working-memory performance compared with the no-music condition. The effect did not occur with white noise.

It is particularly important to study the effect of background music in older adults, since attentional control can be impaired in normal cognitive ageing. Older adults tend to be more sensitive to distractions in the environment (Darowski et al., 2008), although they also tend to be more accurate in cognitive tasks than their younger counterparts, but slower (Hsieh and Lin, 2014). Reaves and colleagues (2016) investigated the impact of background music on a concurrent paired-associate learning task in healthy young and older adults. Young and older adults listened to music or sat in silence while simultaneously studying face-name pairs. Participants’ memory for the pairs was then tested while listening to either the same or different music. Participants also made subjective ratings about how distracting they found each song to be. Despite the fact that all participants rated music as more distracting than silence, only older adults’ associative memory performance was impaired by music. These findings are consistent with theories that older adults may fail to inhibit the processing of distracting task-irrelevant information.

Alain and Woods (1999) and Andrés and colleagues (2006) demonstrated that adding irrelevant sounds to a visual discrimination task impaired the reaction times of older adults more than young adults, as well as the amplitude of the event-related potential linked to the processing of distraction. Fernandez and colleagues (2020) demonstrated that, compared to silence or sad and tender music, joyful and highly arousing background music enhanced perceptual judgements in a flanker task in both older and young adults, although no background music effect was found on older adults’ attentional control performance. However, this study used a modified version of the flanker task, which measured several components of attention and included cues before the trials. A more challenging task measuring attentional control specifically might have produced different results.

Music has also been found to have an impact on arousal in older people. For instance, Hirokawa (2004) examined the effects of participants’ preferred music and relaxation instructions on older adults’ arousal and working memory. Fifteen female older adults participated in ten minutes of three experimental conditions: participant preferred music, relaxation instructions and silence. Four subcategories of arousal level,—energy, tiredness, tension and calmness—were measured before and after the experimental treatment. After each condition, participants completed a working-memory test. The findings indicated that music increased participants’ energy levels, while relaxation and silence significantly decreased energy levels, and increased tiredness and calmness. All experimental conditions decreased tension. Scores on the working-memory test were not significantly different among the conditions. There were no clear relationships between the four arousal levels and working-memory scores. Overall, the findings indicated that preferred music had the potential to increase older adults’ energetic arousal and reduce tension.

The literature on episodic memory suggests that background music may have positive effects on younger and healthy older adults (Bottiroli et al., 2014; Ferreri et al., 2015), although it may be particularly beneficial among older adults with cognitive impairment, contributing to arousal, mood and reward systems. Music may also recruit brain areas spared after degeneration, and elicit compensatory mechanisms (Ferreri and Verga, 2016) which are not activated in healthy participants under the same music stimulation. Alternatively, music may reduce task-related anxiety, which is expected to be higher in cognitively impaired participants. For instance, Ferreri and colleagues (2014) investigated whether music could improve episodic memory in older adults while decreasing prefrontal cortex activity. Sixteen healthy older adults aged 64 to 65 encoded lists of words presented with or without a musical background, while dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity was monitored using an eight-channel continuous wave near infrared spectroscopy system. Behavioural results indicated a better source-memory performance for words encoded with music compared to words encoded with silence. There was a bilateral decrease of oxyhaemoglobin values in the music-encoding condition compared to the silence condition, suggesting that music modulated the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during encoding in a less demanding direction. Overall, the results indicated that music can help older adults in memory performance by decreasing their prefrontal cortex activity.

Reviews and Meta-Analyses

The number of reviews and meta-analyses on the impact of background music on cognitive tasks is relatively limited compared with other areas of research. In a review of studies adopting a priming condition before performance on a cognitive task, Pietschnig and colleagues (2010) observed that the Mozart effect (as first researched by Rauscher and colleagues (1993)) had been difficult to replicate, leading to an abundance of conflicting results. They conducted a meta-analysis of nearly 40 studies involving over 3000 participants, and found a small overall estimated effect for samples exposed to the Mozart sonata K. 448 and samples that had been exposed to a non-musical stimulus or no stimulus at all preceding spatial-task performance. Calculation of effect sizes for samples exposed to other musical stimuli and samples exposed to non-musical stimuli or no stimuli at all yielded effects similar in strength. There was also evidence for confounding publication bias, requiring downward correction of effects. Overall, Pietschnig and colleagues concluded that there were noticeably higher overall effects in studies performed by Rauscher and colleagues than in studies performed by other researchers. Overall, they found little evidence for a specific, performance-enhancing Mozart effect.

In a meta-analysis undertaken by Kämpfe and colleagues (2011), the overall effect of listening to background music was established as null. Further examination led the authors to the conclusion that this finding was most likely caused by the averaging-out of specific effects, such as improved arousal positively influencing achievement in sports, or detrimental effects on reading or memory. Not all of the reviews have come to quite such negative conclusions, in part because their focus was different. For instance, Schwartz and colleagues (2017) undertook a systematic literature review and identified 20 studies between 1970 and 2014 focusing on the role of contingent and noncontingent background music to facilitate task engagement, enhance performance and alter behaviour. They concluded that, although the research addressing background music had mixed results, there was evidence suggesting that this could be an effective strategy for increasing task engagement and performance, and decreasing stimulatory behaviour for individuals with developmental disabilities. As providing musical stimuli is relatively inexpensive and may be less intrusive in comparison to other strategies, they argued that its use merited additional study to explore how and to what extent music could affect behaviour. Similarly, Peck and colleagues (2016) reviewed existing anecdotal and empirical evidence related to the enhancing effects of music exposure on cognitive function and provided a discussion of the potential underlying mechanisms that might explain music’s effects. Specifically, they outlined the potential role of the dopaminergic system, the autonomic nervous system and the default network in explaining how music may enhance memory functions in persons with Alzheimer’s disease.

De la Mora Velasco and Hirumi (2020) synthesised the findings from 30 studies that examined the effects of background music on learning from 2008 to 2018. Frequencies and percentages were used to describe background music’s effects on learning across studies, the methods used and the background music characteristics manipulated. They concluded that the results were inconclusive and the findings from the research were inconsistent. Drawing similar conclusions, Ferreri and Verga (2016) reviewed the evidence for the role of background music on verbal learning and memory. They argued that the existing research provided conflicting findings. Although several studies had shown a positive effect of music on the encoding and retrieval of verbal stimuli, music had also been suggested to hinder mnemonic performance by dividing attention. They argued that the extent to which music boosted cognitive functions relied on the relative complexity of the musical and verbal stimuli employed. Overall, background music has been found to have beneficial, detrimental or no effect on a variety of behavioural and psychological outcome measures. The reasons why this might be the case are discussed below.

Explaining the Impact of Background Music on Cognitive Performance

There are several theories which have attempted to explain how listening to music prior to undertaking a cognitive task may enhance performance. The first is a neural priming effect, associated specifically with spatial-temporal reasoning. The second is the arousal and mood hypothesis (Thompson et al., 2001), which suggests that music enhances arousal and promotes a positive mood, consequently affecting and benefiting attentional processes (Husain et al., 2002). This theory postulates that introducing a preferred auditory background prior to a task makes the task increasingly interesting, thereby enhancing the learner’s levels of arousal, and that this level of heightened and increased arousal leads to an increase in attention, thus enhancing performance.

The explanations of the effects of background music in terms of arousal and mood also apply to music played in the background. Research has demonstrated this effect when music is presented simultaneously with a variety of executive tasks, such as cognitive flexibility, working memory and attentional control (Fernandez et al., 2020; Jiang et al., 2011; Shih et al., 2016; Thompson et al., 2005). However, not all of the available research findings fit well within this theoretical relationship between music and cognitive performance. For example, some research suggests that highly pleasant music requires more attentional resources and thus may impair cognitive performance in the context of attentional tasks (Nemati et al., 2019). For instance, music can positively affect working memory (Revelle and Loftus, 1989) which results in more material being processed by the learner consecutively, enhancing their performance, while mood improvement enhances cognitive performance through increased dopamine levels in the brain (Ashby et al., 1999). Explanations relating to arousal also need to take account of anxiety, as some studies have shown that high anxiety is associated with lower task efficiency (Tanaka et al., 2006). Byrne and Eysenck (1995) also found that the task efficiency of participants with high anxiety was lower than that of low-anxiety participants. Where individuals select background music themselves, there may be a rewarding effect in terms of the enjoyment it may bring (Arnett, 1995).

Music may also interfere with cognitive processes. Concentrated listening to music requires cognitive effort for processing, analysis and extracting meaning (Berlyne, 1971). Listening to complex, arousal-evoking music may therefore reduce the attentional space available for task performance. When individuals play music while carrying out a cognitive task, they do not attend to both the music and the task simultaneously; attention switches between the two (Madsen, 1987). Depending on their interest, their focus may be greater on the task or the music.

Another explanation for the impact of music comes from its ability to provide rewards. Salimpoor and colleagues (2013) point out that listening to music is amongst the most rewarding experiences for humans. Music has no functional resemblance to other rewarding stimuli, and has no demonstrated biological value, yet individuals continue listening to music for pleasure. It has been suggested that the pleasurable aspects of music listening are related to changes in emotional arousal, although this link has not been directly investigated. Salimpoor and colleagues (2013), using methods of high temporal sensitivity, investigated whether there was a systematic relationship between dynamic increases in pleasure states and physiological indicators of emotional arousal, including changes in heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity, body temperature and blood volume pulse. Twenty-six participants listened to self-selected intensely pleasurable music and neutral music that was individually selected for them based on low pleasure ratings they provided based on other participants’ music. The ‘chills phenomenon’ was used to index intensely pleasurable responses to music. During music listening, continuous real-time recordings of subjective pleasure states and simultaneous recordings of sympathetic nervous system activity, an objective measure of emotional arousal, were obtained. The findings revealed a strong positive correlation between ratings of pleasure and emotional arousal. Importantly, a dissociation was revealed, as individuals who did not experience pleasure also showed no significant increases in emotional arousal. There are broader implications for these findings in that strongly felt emotions can be rewarding in the absence of a physically tangible reward or specific functional goal.

Neuroscientific studies have established a relationship between music, emotion and changed brain activity. For instance, Blood and colleagues (1999) used positron emission tomography to examine cerebral blood-flow changes related to affective responses to music. Ten volunteers were scanned while listening to six versions of a novel musical passage varying systematically in degree of dissonance. Reciprocal cerebral blood-flow covariations were observed in several distinct paralimbic and neocortical regions as a function of dissonance and of perceived pleasantness versus unpleasantness. The findings suggested that music may recruit neural mechanisms similar to those previously associated with pleasant or unpleasant emotional states, but different from those underlying other components of music perception, and other emotions such as fear. In a later study, Blood and Zatorre (2001) showed that intensely pleasurable responses to music correlated with activity in the brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Positron emission tomography was used to study neural mechanisms underlying intensely pleasant emotional responses to music in ten university students aged between 20 and 30, each with at least eight years of music training. Each participant selected one piece of music that consistently elicited intensely pleasant emotional responses, including chills. The music was all in the classical genre, and included pieces such as Rachmaninov’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor’, ‘Opus 30’ and ‘Intermezzo Adagio’ and Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’. These are instrumental works with no lyrics. Participants reported that their emotional responses were intrinsic to the music itself, producing minimal personal associations or memories. Cerebral blood-flow changes were measured in response to participant-selected music that elicited the highly pleasurable experience of shivers down the spine or chills. Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate, electromyogram measures and respiration. As intensity of chills increased, cerebral blood flow increases and decreases were observed in brain regions thought to be involved in reward and motivation, emotion, and arousal, including the ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex and ventral medial prefrontal cortex. These brain structures are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex and recreational drugs. This finding links music with biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry involved in pleasure and reward. Activity in these regions in relation to reward processes is known to involve dopamine and opioid systems, as well as other neurotransmitters. Dopaminergic activity appears to be the common mechanism underlying reward response to all naturally rewarding stimuli. Support for involvement of opioid systems specifically in response to music comes from a preliminary study that demonstrated that blocking opioid receptors with naloxone decreased or inhibited the chills response in some participants. The possibility of a direct functional interaction between the hippocampus amygdala and midbrain is supported by the exactly opposite correlation of dorsomedial midbrain and left hippocampus amygdala with chills intensity. Thus, activation of the reward system by music may maximise pleasure, not only by activating the reward system but also by simultaneously decreasing activity in brain structures associated with negative emotions. The amygdala and hippocampus both receive inhibitory presynaptic input from cholinergic neurons, suggesting a possible mechanism for decreased activity in these regions as a consequence of activity increases in ventral striatum. Brain structures correlating with intensely pleasant emotion differed considerably from those observed during unpleasant or pleasant responses to musical dissonance or consonance in an earlier study (Blood, 1999). In particular, right parahippocampal activity—previously observed to correlate with unpleasant responses to dissonance—did not correlate with chills intensity, supporting the notion that parahippocampal activity may be specifically related to negative emotion. In addition, regions associated with reward-motivation circuitry, such as the ventral striatum, dorsomedial midbrain, amygdala and hippocampus, were found to correlate with chills intensity but not with the more mildly pleasant emotion associated with consonance. These discrepancies provide further evidence that different emotions are associated with activity in different groups of brain structures.

Nemati and colleagues (2019) also investigated the neural correlates of pleasure induced by listening to highly pleasant and neutral musical excerpts, using electroencephalography. Power-spectrum analysis of the data showed a distinct gradual change in the power of low-frequency oscillations in response to highly pleasant, but not neutral, musical excerpts. Specifically, listening to highly pleasant music was associated with relatively higher oscillatory activity in the theta band over the frontocentral area and in the alpha band over the parieto-occipital area, and a gradual increase in the oscillatory power over time. Correlation analysis between behavioural and electrophysiological data revealed that theta power over the frontocentral electrodes was correlated with subjective assessment of pleasantness while listening to music. To study the link between attention and positive valence, volunteers performed a delayed match-to-sample memory task while listening to the musical excerpts. Their performances were significantly lower under highly pleasant conditions compared to neutral conditions. Listening to pleasant music requires higher degrees of attention, leading to the observed decline in memory performance. Gradual development of low-frequency oscillations in the frontal and posterior areas may be (at least partly) due to gradual recruitment of higher levels of attention over time in response to pleasurable music.

As demonstrated in the earlier sections of this chapter, any single research project generally has a limited focus, and cannot take account of the complexity underlying the impact of background music on task performance. There are also methodological issues relating to the types of task considered. These have included reading comprehension, the completion of mathematical tasks, a range of memory tasks and those relating to attention. There is also an issue relating to how the impact on performance of those tasks is assessed—for instance, physiologically, neurologically, by task performance, observation or rating scales. This is particularly important, as the relationships between these different measures are frequently inconsistent. There are challenges in systematically categorising the nature of the music used in terms of its potential to arouse or generate different moods and the extent to which it is liked or disliked. The music can vary in genre, tempo, timbre, intensity, type (instrumental or vocal), and use of consonance versus dissonance. The relationships between these are complex (Salimpoor et al., 2009), although generally music influences physiological arousal in the expected direction: that is, exciting music leads to increased arousal, calming music the reverse (Abeles and Chung, 1996). These responses are based on pre-wired connections related to the primitive elements of music—for example, loudness, timbre, pitch, and tempo (Peretz, 2010). Favourite music, whether stimulating or relaxing, tends to lower the experience of tension, although not necessarily having a similar impact on physiological responses (Iwanaga and Moroki, 1999). It may also act as a distraction to completion of the task. Finally, there are the subjective aspects of music perception. Individuals respond to the same music in very different ways depending on their musical preferences and their individual characteristics. The structural features of the music (tempo, modality, instrumentation, genre), cultural factors (aspects of the environment including tonality and the way that musical associations are culturally shaped and learned) and associative factors (for example, the personal and subjective meanings placed on a particular piece of music depending on musical experiences) all play a part in responses to music. Where associative factors come into play, the structural and cultural aspects of the music are superseded by personal and associative aspects (see Figure 11.1). Preference may therefore render very different types of music as functionally equivalent. For example, the music which young people may choose to play while studying may differ widely but lead to similar physiological effects. Music may be linked with particular experiences in an individual’s life, evoking pleasant or distressing memories (Robazza et al., 1994). It is also related to identity (MacDonald et al., 2009). Quite different music can thus change mood in the same direction (Field et al., 1998). Formal music training, perhaps because of its impact on identity, affects responses but there are no clear patterns relating to gender, age or social class (Abeles and Chung, 1996). The complex and interacting nature of the factors which influence responses mean that it is difficult to predict the exact effects of any particular piece of music on any individual.

Figure 11.1

There are, of course, interactions between these various factors. In relation to the undertaking of cognitive tasks, a key one is the relationship between the difficulty of the task and the optimal level of arousal needed to undertake it. The Yerkes–Dodson law provides one explanation, stating that arousal levels increase performance up to an optimal level, beyond which overarousal leads to deterioration. Arousal is known to act according to an inverted U shape, where both extremely low and extremely high arousal damages performance, while moderate levels benefit it. This occurs more quickly when the task to be performed is complex or underlearned. Completing a simple task requires a higher level of arousal for concentration to be maintained, while complex tasks require lower arousal levels. Evidence of the way that loud and fast music disrupts reading comprehension (a complex task) supports this explanation (Thompson et al., 2012). Personality factors are also implicated in optimal arousal levels. Introverts have higher resting levels of arousal than extroverts, and are more susceptible to overarousal, which impacts on their task performance when there is background music (Cassidy and MacDonald, 2007; Dobbs et al., 2011). Related to this is the attention drainage effect, which describes attention as a reservoir of mental energy from which resources are drawn to meet situational attentional demands for task processing (Kahneman, 1973; Chou, 2010). Music may, in some circumstances, draw attention away from the task, as it is only possible to pay attention to one thing at a time (Madsen, 1987). For instance, music with lyrics is more likely to interfere with a reading comprehension task than instrumental music if the music is played concurrently with task completion, but this may not apply if the music is used to prime the activity. Music with lyrics may not interfere with task completion if the task is non-verbal. In general, shared attentional resources are involved when processing stimuli from different modalities, including music, and this can lead to impairment in the processing of one or both modalities. Recently, there has been particular interest in the impact of music on the elderly. This has shown that different factors may come into play for this age group, particularly if they are experiencing cognitive impairment. Music played concurrently may distract from task completion, while music played prior to the task may act to enhance motivation and arousal, thus enhancing task performance. Addressing some of these issues, Gonzalez and Aiello (2019) considered the interactions between music-based, task-based, and performer-based characteristics. They hypothesised that music, along with its complexity and volume, would facilitate simple task performance and impair complex task performance, and that an individual’s preference for external stimulation (a dimension of boredom proneness) would moderate these effects. To test this, participants completed cognitive tasks either in silence or with music of varying complexity and volume. The findings showed that music generally impaired complex task performance, complex music facilitated simple task performance, and preference for external stimulation moderated these effects.

An Explanatory Framework

Hallam and MacDonald (2016) discussed the subjective aspects of music perception and how individuals benefited from music or not. They considered how this varied and could even fluctuate within the same listener, because individuals respond differently to the same music depending on the features of the music itself, the individual’s cultural context and additional experience-driven, associative aspects. Individual preferences and ways of responding to music determine whether music influences mood, level of arousal and the capacity to perform better because of these physiological effects. Overall, the impact of background music on performance on any particular task depends on many interacting factors. Figure 11.2 sets out a model of possible contributory factors including the nature of the music itself: its genre, whether it is stimulating or relaxing, its complexity, whether it is familiar, liked, vocal or instrumental, and has been selected by the individual listening to it or imposed on them by others. The model suggests that the effects of music are mediated by the characteristics of the individual: their age, ability, personality, metacognitive skills, musical expertise, familiarity with the music being played and the frequency with which they normally listen to music when they are studying. The current emotional arousal and mood state of the individual may also be influenced by individual characteristics and recent life events. Individual characteristics also have a direct effect on learning outcomes, and a further indirect effect through metacognitive activity. The environment within which the activity is taking place may also be important—for instance, whether the individual is alone or in a familiar place, and whether there are other distractions. The characteristics of the task (for instance, the nature of the processing required, its difficulty, and whether it is perceived as interesting or boring) will also play a part. Currently, little research takes account of all of these factors. Individuals need to be aware of the impact of music on their task performance and adjust their behaviour accordingly. As a general rule, background music which creates high levels of arousal will disrupt work on complex tasks, although it may prevent boredom if a task is repetitive or boring. Working in silence or with relaxing music may enhance performance on a difficult task. Preferred music is likely to have advantages over disliked music. Music with lyrics may be disruptive, particularly if the task is verbal in nature (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2: A model of the effects of background music on behaviour and learning (derived from Hallam and MacDonald, 2016)

Overview

It is clear that understanding how music can affect task performance is complex and requires many factors to be taken into account. Each individual needs to assess their own situation and the task facing them at any given time, and make a decision as to whether music will assist or disrupt their performance, then act accordingly. In the classroom, unless calming music is used to simply lessen general exuberant behaviour, working in silence is likely to be most beneficial to the majority of students, unless they have particular behavioural difficulties or problems with attention (for instance, ADHD or ADD).