I notice several students listening to music while busy at work. I have
no good reason to ask that they remove their headphones and turn off
their devices. As I walk around the room, I admire the elegant, concise
prose each produces.
I ask one student why music helps her concentrate. "It soothes me and
makes me less stressed," she says. "Plus, Ed Sheeran is just awesome."
As a college student, I spent countless hours studying in a dark corner
of the Brandeis University Library. Often, I would lose track of time
and wonder about seeing the sun again. Once, my mother called to ask why
I hadn't yet returned home for Thanksgiving. I had forgotten about the
holiday, focused on getting a jump-start on a major history paper while
listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" on repeat.
Placing aside the issue of my self-induced exile, for me as well, music
offered not only comfort but also increased focus -- or so I thought, at
least until coming across the work of
Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff.
Impaired Performance
Perham's 2010 study,
"Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance.
I recently spoke with Perham, who told me about the "irrelevant sound
effect." This involves a subject conducting a certain task, in this case
recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of
background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what
Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired.
Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair
performance nearly as much.
I'm also interested by another of Perham's conclusions. "We found that
listening to liked or disliked music was exactly the same, and both were
worse than the quiet control condition," he says. "Both impaired
performance on serial-recall tasks."
Still, I'm curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and
if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham
says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers,
doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages.
"Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to
underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of
language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence
together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.
Perham asked his subjects how they think they performed when exposed to
different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when
listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no
difference.
I presented Perham's findings to my students, many of whom still refused
to accept that listening to music while studying impairs performance. I
even gave one of these otherwise bright and thoughtful individuals
early access to my podcast interview with Perham.
"I enjoy listening to music while doing math," she says. "It really
helps me think, and I won't stop listening even with the results of this
study."
Silence is Golden
My student is mistaken, but Perham explains that she should listen to music
before
getting to work, to engage what's known as the "arousal and mood
effect." In fact, as long as she does something enjoyable before hitting
the books -- whether it's listening to music or doing anything else --
past studies have shown that this can produce the same positive effect
on performance.
I ask Perham then about the so-called "Mozart effect," which, in one
early experiment, gave individuals who had recently listened to the
famous classical composer enhanced spatial-rotation skills. When they
stopped listening and were asked to cut and fold paper, they performed
better than when listening to something else.
"Subsequent studies suggested that this wasn't correct," Perham says.
Instead, improved performance had more to do with the preference of sound one listened to before engaging in such work.
"They found it if you like listening to Stephen King's stories," Perham
says. "It wasn't anything to do with classical music or Mozart, it was
to do on whether you liked [listening to] something or not."
In one of his more recent studies, Perham says, he found that reading
while listening to music, especially music with lyrics, impairs
comprehension. In this case, it's spoken lyrics, not acoustical
variation that impairs productivity.
"You've got semantic information that you're trying to use when you're
reading a book, and you've got semantic information from the lyrics,"
Perham says. "If you can understand the lyrics, it doesn't matter
whether you like it or not, it will impair your performance of reading
comprehension."
In conducting my own little experiment, I decided to write this article
in complete silence. These days, I write while listening to Dave
Matthews, John Mayer and other "chill" music. I'm not sure if or how
this fits exactly into Perham's findings, but I finished writing in
about half the time it normally takes me for something of this length.
At the very least, here's to hoping that my experiment will entice my students to also give it a try.
Editor's note: A PDF transcript of David Cutler's interview with Dr. Nick Perham is available on
Spin Education, where this post originally appeared.
