Middle Years

Why Music and Learning Don't Always Mix

This week, I’ve had several conversations with teachers and students about listening to music in class. Many students swear that music helps them focus and improves their learning. The science, however, consistently tells a different story.

Unfortunately, the brain does not truly multitask — it switches rapidly between competing inputs, and every switch carries a cost. Music with lyrics is particularly disruptive, introducing a second stream of language that competes directly with reading and writing; this is what is often referred to as a “cognitive load.” Even instrumental music creates what researchers call an "irrelevant sound effect," disrupting the retention of ordered information, such as the steps in a maths problem or the sequence of an argument. Students who feel more focused while listening to music are often experiencing improved mood, not improved performance — and the two are easy to confuse.

"Feeling focused is not the same as being focused. Students tend to overestimate how much they retain when music is playing."

For routine tasks — copying notes or highlighting already-familiar material — background music causes little harm. For genuinely demanding work, silence (or low-level ambient noise) consistently yields better outcomes – especially when learning something new in a classroom.

Mozart: The Myth

In their 2009 book 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behaviour, Lilienfeld, Lynn, Ruscio, and Beyerstein identify the Mozart effect as myth number six. The myth of the Mozart effect began with a single 1993 study in which college students scored slightly higher on a short spatial reasoning task after listening to Mozart. The effect lasted around 10 minutes and applied to a single narrow test — yet it was rapidly transformed by media coverage and commercial marketing into a claim that classical music makes children smarter and raises IQ.

Subsequent research has not supported this. Large replication studies and meta-analyses found that the modest effect was due to general arousal and mood, not anything unique to Mozart or classical music. No credible evidence supports the idea that passively listening to music produces lasting gains in intelligence or academic ability.

It is worth noting, however, that learning to play an instrument appears to offer modest cognitive benefits because it demands active engagement. Passive listening does not produce the same effect.

A practical approach

Save music as a reward between study blocks rather than a backdrop during them. If some background sound genuinely helps, low-level ambient noise is less disruptive than music. And when the task is hard, keep it quiet — the more demanding the work, the more the brain needs the space.

So, if a Middle Years student (or any student, really) states that listening to music helps them learn or focus, the science just doesn’t support this. Leave the headphones, turn off the tunes and get on with the learning task. The only exception would be a music classroom, where music (obviously) is crucial to learning!

Dr Ben Hawthorne

Head of Middle Years