Does music help you study? What the research shows

What do studies of music and studying show?

The fullest answer for reading comes from a meta-analysis by Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele, published in 2018, which pooled 65 studies of background sound during reading. Across 54 studies of reading comprehension, people understood a little less of what they read with sound playing than in silence. The size of that difference is measured as Hedges' g, a difference in standard deviations, where researchers count 0.2 as a small effect, 0.5 as medium and 0.8 as large. For all background sound together it was −0.21: small, but reliably below zero.

Speech did the most harm, at −0.26 in 20 studies, then music at −0.19 in 36 and noise at −0.17 in 12, though the range for noise reaches 0.002, just past no effect. Reading speed barely moved, at −0.06 in 13 studies, a range that crosses zero. So people read at much the same pace with sound on, and took in a little less. The analysis found no general difference between adults and children.

Hedges' g against reading in silence

Measure and sound	Average	95% range
Comprehension, all background sound: 54 studies	−0.21	−0.30 to −0.13
Comprehension, speech: 20 studies	−0.26	−0.36 to −0.17
Comprehension, music: 36 studies	−0.19	−0.34 to −0.05
Comprehension, noise: 12 studies	−0.17	−0.33 to 0.002
Reading speed, all background sound: 13 studies	−0.06	−0.15 to 0.02

Download the reading results (CSV)

Reading is not the only kind of study. An earlier meta-analysis by Kämpfe, Sedlmeier and Renkewitz looked at background music across many activities in adults and found that, taken all together, its effect averaged out to nothing, most probably because specific effects pulled in different directions. Compared with no music, they wrote, background music "disturbs the reading process, has some small detrimental effects on memory, but has a positive impact on emotional reactions". Reading and memorising, the heart of most revision, are exactly where it costs something.

Is music with lyrics worse for studying?

Yes, by a clear margin in the studies so far. Vasilev's analysis put a 95 per cent probability on songs with lyrics distracting readers more than instrumental music, and found no difference between lyrics and intelligible speech. For someone reading, a song with words they understand is much like a person talking nearby.

In 2023 Souza and Barbosa, at the University of Porto, tested this head on. Students worked through tasks of verbal memory, visual memory, reading comprehension and arithmetic in three conditions: silence, instrumental lo-fi hip-hop, and music with lyrics, over two sessions of 123 and 113 students. Music with lyrics hindered verbal memory, visual memory and reading comprehension. The lo-fi music "did not credibly hinder or improve performance". The students also judged their own learning as they went: they knew the lyrics were costing them, yet sometimes judged the instrumental music to be helping when their scores showed no such gain.

Does it matter how fast or loud the music is?

It seems to. Thompson, Schellenberg and Letnic played instrumental music slow or fast, and soft or loud, with 25 people in each of the four conditions, who had four minutes to read a passage and three to answer six multiple-choice questions. Only one combination took comprehension significantly below that of people reading in silence: fast and loud. In the authors' words, background instrumental music "is most likely to disrupt reading comprehension when the music is fast and loud".

Kämpfe's meta-analysis found a related pattern across activities: the tempo of the music "influences the tempo of activities that are performed while being exposed to background music". For work at a desk, slow and quiet is the safer choice.

Why does background sound get in the way?

Researchers have two main explanations, and the diagram sets them side by side. The first is meaning. Reading means building up the sense of a text, and words you can follow in the background compete for the same work. In Vasilev's words, "the semantic properties of the irrelevant speech can interfere with building the semantic representations of the text that is being read". That fits speech and lyrics doing the most harm.

The second is change. In memory experiments where people recall a list of items in order, Jones, Madden and Miles found that background speech disrupted memory only when it kept changing: "Simple unvarying or repetitive speech sounds were not sufficient to induce the irrelevant speech effect". This became the changing-state idea: sound with considerable acoustic variation disrupts, and steady sound does not.

Where each sound sits

Sound	Words you can follow	Keeps changing
Speech and songs with lyrics	Yes	Yes
Instrumental music	No	Yes
Steady noise, a repeated sound	No	No
The Strings mode on this page	No	Yes
The Mercury tone on this page	No	No

The two routes do not explain everything. If change were the whole story, instrumental music should distract readers more than steady noise. In Vasilev's analysis it did not: the effects of instrumental music and of steady noise on reading were both "very close to 0", a result the authors call "contrary to the predicted difference from the changing-state hypothesis". For reading, meaning matters most. Noise as a whole, though, still cost readers a little, and the authors argue that new theories are needed to explain distraction by noise as well as by speech.

What happened to the Mozart effect?

In 1993 Rauscher and colleagues reported in Nature that ten minutes of Mozart raised college students' scores on an abstract reasoning test by 8 or 9 IQ points, against relaxation instructions or silence. It became known as the Mozart effect. Six years later Christopher Chabris pooled the studies that had tried to repeat it and found that "any cognitive enhancement is small and does not reflect any change in IQ or reasoning ability in general", coming instead from one specific kind of task.

Thompson, Schellenberg and Husain then asked why any effect showed up at all. Before a spatial test, people either listened to music or sat in silence. For some the music was a Mozart sonata, "a pleasant and energetic piece", and for others an Albinoni adagio, "a slow, sad piece". Only those who heard Mozart did better after the music than after silence, and when the researchers held the differences in arousal and mood constant, the effect disappeared. They concluded that the Mozart effect "is an artifact of arousal and mood". Music played before a task can lift mood and alertness, and that, more than Mozart, appears to be what made the difference.

Can music sit well with dull or easy work?

Sometimes, and the research suggests why. Kiss and Linnell asked 40 students to do a long, plain reaction-time task that measures sustained attention, once in silence and once with 30 minutes of music they chose themselves. With their own music, they reported being on task more often and mind-wandering less, though their reaction times were no faster or steadier than in silence. The authors read it as music lifting arousal on what they call "a low-demanding sustained-attention task".

How much a person can hold in mind seems to matter as well. Lehmann and Seufert had 81 college students learn from a text with two pop songs playing or in silence. On average, recall was the same either way, and arousal and mood did not explain the results. For understanding the text, though, the students' working memory capacity made the difference: "the higher the learners’ working memory capacity, the better they learned with background music".

People seem to sense this. Goltz and Sadakata asked people how they use background music while reading, writing, memorising and thinking. Their habits varied widely, but people "tend to use less BGM when engaged in more difficult tasks", BGM being background music, cared less about what played during easier tasks, and younger people used more of it than older ones.

Why do so many people study with music?

Partly because it makes long work pleasanter: Kämpfe's meta-analysis found that background music had a positive effect on emotional reactions. Partly habit and taste. And partly, Souza and Barbosa suggest, because people misjudge it: their students knew lyrics cost them, but sometimes thought instrumental music was helping when it made no measurable difference.

Comments under Harmonance's own videos show both sides of it: sound kept on through the working day, and the question of whether that is the right way to use it.

I love listening to this while working

How does this really work? Am I allowed to do my day job and listen to this or should I meditate on this sound?

There is no rule. Some listeners keep a tone on while they work, and others sit with it and do nothing else. The research gives no reason to expect a tone to do more for study than any quiet, steady sound without words, and no reason to avoid it either.

Is there a best frequency for studying?

None of the research here points to one. None of the music studies above tested a single tone at a named frequency. Most of the research on frequencies and study is about binaural beats: each ear hears a slightly different tone, and the brain hears the difference as a pulse.

A 2019 meta-analysis by Garcia-Argibay and colleagues pooled 35 results from 22 studies of binaural beats, across several outcomes with memory and attention among them, and found a medium effect overall, a Hedges' g of 0.45. Beats heard before the task, or before and during it, did better than beats heard only during it. Whether the brain falls into step with the beat is less clear. A systematic review by Ingendoh and colleagues looked for that in 14 studies: five found results in line with it, eight did not, and one was mixed. For beta beats, the kind the Need to focus page plays, "none of the studies using stimulation in the beta frequency range found entrainment effects".

The guides to whether binaural beats work, to beta waves and to gamma waves go further into that research.

What does the Need to focus page play?

The Need to focus page leads with the Mercury tone, 141.27 Hz, then 741 Hz and the Rising Beta Session, a binaural beat for headphones that rises from 16 to 24 beats a second. The Mercury tone comes from Hans Cousto's cosmic octave. Mercury orbits the Sun once in 87.969 days measured against the stars, the figure both Cousto's table and NASA's Mercury fact sheet give. Read as one very slow vibration, 87.969 days, or 7,600,521.6 seconds, is 0.0000001316 cycles a second. Doubled 30 times, which multiplies it by 1,073,741,824, it reaches 141.27 Hz, close to a C sharp. The guide to planetary frequencies sets out the whole method, and Mercury sits with the other planets in the cosmic octave collection. The 741 Hz tone is one of the solfeggio frequencies, and the guide to 174, 417 and 741 Hz covers it.

The research above points to two things that matter: words, and how much a sound changes. Neither tone has words, so Harmonance measured how much the page's sound changes. Every Mercury player plays a 100-second recording of the tone on a loop, and the Strings mode plays a 180-second arrangement of strings built on 141.27 Hz. For each tenth of a second, the measure asks how much of the sound's spectrum, its mix of pitches, differs from the tenth before: 0 per cent is the same sound and 100 per cent an entirely different one, and a change of loudness alone does not count.

The page's two sounds, measured

Measure	Mercury tone	Strings mode
Spectrum changing each tenth of a second, on average	1.1 per cent	15.7 per cent
Lowest and highest second	0.9 and 1.6 per cent	11.8 and 19.1 per cent
Loudness overall	−23.3 LUFS	−23.3 LUFS
Loudness range	0.7 LU	3.4 LU
Strongest pitches	141.27 Hz	188.73, 141.33 and 356.21 Hz

Download the measurements (CSV)

So the plain tone is about as steady as a sound gets. Its spectrum barely moves, its loudness holds within 0.7 LU on the broadcast loudness meter, EBU R 128, and its strongest overtone, at 282.54 Hz, sits 23.1 dB below it. The strings change about 14 times as much, and keep changing in every second of the three minutes; their loudness ranges over 3.4 LU. The 741 Hz tone measures much like the Mercury tone, with 0.7 per cent of its spectrum changing on average. None of the three has words. On the research so far, the tones sit at the steady end of the changing-state idea, and the strings sit with instrumental music, which came close to no effect on reading in Vasilev's analysis. No study has tested any of these sounds, or any single tone, for studying.

The Mercury tone's own page has the tone on its own, with the story of where it comes from. If you would rather try a binaural beat, the Rising Beta Session plays one for headphones, and the binaural beats collection holds the other sessions, including the gamma session.

How do you try music while you study?

• Match the sound to the task. For reading and memorising, the studies favour silence or sound without words. Keep songs with lyrics for easier work.
• Keep it slow and quiet. Fast, loud music was the one combination that cost readers in Thompson's experiment.
• Try it before you start. Music before a task can lift mood and alertness, as the Mozart research found, and binaural beats did better before a task than only during it.
• Watch the volume. The US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders says sounds at or below 70 dBA, "even after long exposure, are unlikely to cause hearing loss", and that long or repeated exposure at 85 dBA or more can cause it. Study needs far less than either: just enough to hear.
• Notice for yourself. Try one study session with the sound and one without, and compare what you remember an hour later, not only how it felt. The students in Souza and Barbosa's experiment were not always right about what was helping them.

The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health notes that, in general, research on music-based interventions does not show any negative effects, while music at too high a volume can contribute to noise-induced hearing loss. The Need to focus page plays the Mercury tone, 741 Hz and the Rising Beta Session in one place, Harmonance Studio adds timers and ambient layers for a session of your own, and the guide to music and sleep asks the same question at bedtime.

Sources and limits

Most of the studies here are short laboratory experiments, many with students, and most measured reading or memory over minutes, not weeks of revision. The effects they found are small on average and vary between studies and between people. No study has tested the Mercury tone, a Harmonance tone or any single pitch for study. The measurements of the page's sound come from the site's own audio files, measured by Harmonance: the strings at the page's default level, without the quiet room sound the page adds beneath them. How loud either is in your room depends on your device and its volume. The listener comments are two people's words, quoted whole and without names, not findings.

1. Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele, auditory distraction during reading: a Bayesian meta-analysis: 65 studies.
2. Kämpfe, Sedlmeier and Renkewitz, the impact of background music on adult listeners: a meta-analysis.
3. Souza and Barbosa, music with lyrics interferes with cognitive tasks.
4. Thompson, Schellenberg and Letnic, fast and loud background music disrupts reading comprehension.
5. Jones, Madden and Miles, privileged access by irrelevant speech to short-term memory: the changing-state idea.
6. Chabris, prelude or requiem for the Mozart effect?
7. Thompson, Schellenberg and Husain, arousal, mood and the Mozart effect.
8. Kiss and Linnell, the effect of preferred background music on task-focus in sustained attention.
9. Lehmann and Seufert, the influence of background music on learning: working memory capacity.
10. Goltz and Sadakata, do you listen to music while studying?
11. Garcia-Argibay and colleagues, a meta-analysis of binaural beats.
12. Ingendoh and colleagues, binaural beats to entrain the brain?: a systematic review.
13. NCCIH, music and health: what you need to know.
14. NIDCD, noise-induced hearing loss: safe listening levels.
15. Cousto, tuning data for the Earth, Moon, planets and Sun: the Mercury tone.
16. NASA, Mercury fact sheet: Mercury's orbit.