Classical music, techno and jazz: when you search for study music on spotify, you get a lot of different genres. But is it even efficient to listen to music while studying, or is it just distracting you from things that you need to do? A growing amount of research suggests that under certain conditions, music can indeed be a beneficial companion to studying, enhancing concentration, motivation, and overall performance.
Because of the mixed results of earlier studies, Goltz and Sadakata were one of the researchers that made a questionnaire in 2021 about the correlation between music and studying. In this research there was found that people use more background music when it comes to easier tasks than they use when it comes to difficult tasks. Another thing that was found in this research was that younger generations tend to use more background music than older adults. In this paper the conclusion is that four variables have influence on productivity while listening to music; cognitive capacity, attention, mood and arousal. There were different theories that were being confirmed. These theories were: the music may take up too much resources to optimatically perform the main task, unpleasant background music may interfere with mood and thereby interfere with performance, music may over-arouse the listener and like this hinder performance, or the background music enhances mood and thereby task performance. From this research we got some interesting information.
At this moment you may be thinking about your own music listening experience. Maybe you listen to no music, rock music or jazz music while studying. You may be listening to different music when you are writing something than you do when you are calculating things. To hear a few experiences I asked a few students about music while studying.
I heard a lot of different answers; people that were listening to pop music, techno music, classical music and people that listened to lofi beats. I did hear a consensus about listening to music without lyrics. People told me that this music was less distracting than music with lyrics. I also heard that when doing things where you don’t have to concentrate really hard, music with lyrics are being used. But I also got one really surprising answer. Somebody told me that they listened to podcasts while studying. This was a big surprise for me, because for me personally it would be very distracting.
To conclude, everybody has their own preference when it’s about music and studying. I would say: test every music genre and see what works for you! :) //
