Does music help or hinder focus?

Music is a great tool to relax after a stressful interview of your dream job or to tense up with adrenaline to get ready for the daily morning jog. Music is a tool to control your mind, but is it healthy?

Does it help?

Ever since the increase in popularity of music, its influence is surely controlling. Music nowadays definitely holds a big proportion in our lives, and its repute is still on-going. Many people tend to listen to music when carrying out tasks such, studying for exams, reading a book, working on an assignment and many others. These people argue that having background music sustains your concentration.

According to experiments performed by Maria Witek and other colleagues, a brain requires an average level of syncopation in music to draw out a comfortable environment and tendency to move. In other words, the music being used must be just funky enough in order to make them want to move.

It is not only the matter of syncopating of the music but also the type which makes it even more efficient in focusing. It seems clear that the type of rhythm, tone, and noise surely has a huge impact in encouraging your concentration.

Although Witek has suggested that music which is generally funky tends to increase focus, some online studies claim that it is really down to one’s personal preference. Music you enjoy listening to will help you focus, while music you don’t will rather bother you. It is very important for one to find the right taste of music if they would want to successfully double task.

Alice Fiorito, a senior at AISG, enjoys listening to music while working on her tasks. “I find the pop and classical genres the most efficient to get my work done faster at higher quality.” Obviously, this may or may not be you; everyone has different tastes, but it is a smart choice to refer to her opinion and develop your own too.

Does it hinder?

Besides jazz, acoustic, classical, and electronic music, certain songs, especially ones with lyrics, can hinder your focus from getting that A+. Current popular music can be a contradiction towards the helpful side of studying with music. Most of the popular songs interfere with the reading comprehension and information processing.

Fast and loud music can definitely restrict someone when doing a reading comprehension. A University College in London study found that both introverted and extroverted undergraduate students performed worse on a reading comprehension test when pop music was played than when taken in silence. The same test was taken for adults, at the University of Wales, both met similar results: you cannot take a test when music is playing. Our short-term memory is only capable of saving a certain amount of information. If you are listening to music, you are using your brain’s bandwidth, also known as the “cognitive resources.” It was also seen, however, that introverts and extroverts can have different responses towards listening to music while gathering information and focusing. Introverts tend to be more distracted when listening to music, whereas extroverts tend to get extra motivation on sticking to a task. It also depends on the purpose of the music. If it’s for an extra boost of cognitive response, then it’s useful but if it is a way to stray further away from studying, then it is hindering. “It’s far more efficient to focus on one thing than to multitask, such as listening to music and studying,” says senior Josh Kim.

Genres such as soundtracks, jazz, acoustic, classical, and electronic music tend to be better than others for concentration – although evidence tends to suggest silence is better than any type of music.

This article is a written collaboration with David Hu and Josh Kim.