Personally, I have a hard time studying in silence and I can assume that the girls on my floor feel the same way considering there’s music coming from behind every door when walking down the hallway to the bathroom. Sometimes I find it helpful to play music in order to get stuff done, other times I find myself having a karaoke/dance party with my roommate. It’s tough to say if it’s actually beneficial and I figured looking into it would be a good idea.
The first post I found wasn’t so much informative but gave some helpful tips for studiers who listen to music. There were ten tips given which gave basic help in order to reduce distraction. The first few highlight that listening to something classical, smooth, a set rhythm, or with sounds of nature is the best way to receive the most productivity while studying. The other tips were less about what kind of music and more of how to get the best out of listening to music. These tips included:
- making a playlist so that constant searching wasn’t necessary
- not listening to the radio to avoid getting distracted by ads/presenters
- making a set playlist of about 40-50 minutes in order to designate when it was okay to take a break
- putting the music at a moderate volume to play as background music
- listening to music before bed or an exam in order to feel relaxed and relieve stress
Hopefully these helpful tips can help improve productivity and benefit your studying habits!
The next article I found was a lot more informative and relevant to science since that is the point of this. This piece highlights the impact of listening to music while studying. One study found tested students that listened to their preferred music group while studying versus when they didn’t listen to music at all or listened to sedative or stimulative music. Results proved that students that studied with their preferred music taste did worse and were much more distracted and then listening to no music performed the best. In another complementary study, it was proven that listening to sedative music was better than stimulative music. Sedative music is smooth and has a flowing melody while stimulative music has an upbeat tempo that evokes the rest of your body to join in with it. Therefore iIt was predicted that tasks performed in silence would yield better results than tasks performed both in the soft music and the loud music conditions, demonstrating that music is a distracter to cognitive performance. (Dolegui, Arielle)”
In my opinion and through the studies, it can be concluded that not enough studies show that music is one hundred percent bad for you while studying. I do believe that it can sometimes be distracting but essentially both articles articulate the reader to listen to the right choice in music while studying instead of letting yourself get distracted. It is important that the right choice is made in order to produce the most work efficiently with our time. This should be researched more by scientists and students in order to diminish any theory that is wrong which may cause people to waste some time by listening to the wrong type of music. Basically, it’s important to be aware of what we listen to while studying and make sure that our minds are focused on the work and not on what is being played.