23 How Music May Save Your Failing Education

This essay was composed in November 2024 and uses MLA documentation.

Have you ever sat down to study in complete silence? You sit for an hour or two, with nothing but the droning absence of sound other than the keys clicking on your laptop or the scratching of your pencil to paper? Alternatively, do you put your favorite playlist on and turn it to max volume? After all your hard work, you go take your exam, scratching your brain on what you studied, only to get a low test score. How you study the material, either in silence or with music, could be how you improve those scores.

So, does music help when it comes to memory recall? Does it ultimately distract you from what you need to remember? Many studies have come to their conclusions on whether or not it does, but most have small sample sets and target specific genres of music and research topics. A vast majority of study groups have shown an improvement in test scores between those who listen to music in the background or have prior musical training in their lives. Still, others showcase that background music is actually detrimental to your test scores. These studies talk about the Mozart Effect, which is focused on classical music, and the Arousal-Mood Theory, which is your mind working harder if you are listening to music you enjoy.

In this thesis, we will discuss how theories such as the Mozart Effect and Arousal-Mood Theory can help with memory recall as well as how educators can and do use music to help with learning, and improving test scores in their classes. We’ll look into how musicians in life compare to non-musicians in intelligence, along with how the brain changes and develops for child musicians. We’ll go over how music also helps improve your mental health and how that can improve your scores. Finally, we will look into the research and understand what all the conclusions are.

How Mozart Saved My Final Exams!

There is a term that floats around when talking about studying with music, called The Mozart Effect. It is said that people who listen to classical music such as Mozart will improve their studies. It is similar to how you might’ve heard how playing Mozart helps babies with intelligence when they are in the womb. According to a study written in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, “Participants in the Mozart condition outperformed the other group. The authors found a direct, positive influence of listening to Mozart sonatas on spatial abilities” (Lehmann 2). This is in correlation with Cyn Meyer’s research, a life coach for the elderly, expressing “Bottiroli found that arousal and mood-enhancing music, like Mozart, improves memory tasks among older adults” (Meyer 5:56-6:02).

Among both students and the elderly, particularly those struggling with dementia and Alzheimer’s, it appears that Mozart’s music was beneficial for memory recall. In the study from the Frontiers in Psychology, researchers did notice that depending on the mood of the music, including things like tempo and pitch, scores actually lowered and got closer to a median of those without listening to music. They called this the Arousal-Mood Hypothesis, which depends on your own personal thoughts on the music. If it makes you bored or uncomfortable, your mind will focus too much on that, or flip off the capacity to learn. While the Mozart Effect can provide the focus to power through finals, it also opened my eyes to the deeper connections between music and pedagogy, helping me grasp what it truly means to learn effectively.

Music Helped Me Understand What Pedagogy Means

When it comes to learning, music always helps me with things that are based on memorization. One such example based on my experiences is with Hamilton the Musical. I am terrible at history and memorization, and had it not been for the Broadway musical in 2015, I would still to this day not even know what year North America became a nation, let alone the names of people who were involved. Incorporating music into learning has always been around in school as well. We sing the ABCs, you might’ve learned how to do times tables with a tune played for each number, and the song from Sound of Music helped many people memorize the solfege of singing, also known as Do Re Mi, and so on.

As previously stated, music is often used in schools and children’s TV shows to help teach while making it fun for the kids, yet a study by Sandra L. Calvert showed that it is possible to be detrimental as well. She explains, “the study found that singing had a negative impact on recognition of verbally presented content, as the music may have functioned as a distraction and participants may have allocated their processing efforts of the songs to a relatively superficial level. Put simply, the participants paid more attention to the sound of the music than to the words at the expense of the content’s deeper, semantic meaning” (“Music and Pedagogy…” 3). The study worked with kids coming from multiple different demographics and education styles, along with playing different genres of music. It was shown in the results of the study that, “the regression results revealed that participants performed significantly better on both memory and cognitive tasks when they reported that they especially liked the audio. These findings suggest that presenting information in ways that are well-received by participants will likely better promote learning” (“Music and Pedagogy…” 20). This can make it hard for educators to use music in pedagogy, as they can’t always know what everyone’s music taste is and accommodate for that.

In the research performed by Lorna Jakobson, she found that participants had performed better with memorizing lyrics, especially if they had previous knowledge of music, stating, “thus, in several studies musicians have been found to outperform nonmusicians on tests requiring the learning and verbatim recall of spoken song lyrics (Kilgour, Jakobson, & Cuddy, 2000) and prose passages (Jakobson, Cuddy, & Kilgour, 2003)” (Jakobsen 42). This research shows how previous knowledge of music also helps with the memory recall of songs, overall, helping in education with music use.

Molding the Brain with Music

So why does musical knowledge help with memory recall? Is it simply easier to pick out key phrases? Like in the Arousal-Mood Hypothesis, do you feel and enjoy the music more? As someone with an extensive history of learning music, I feel like it’s a little bit of both. When I listen to music, I’m able to visualize the notes on the piano or the chords on a guitar while the song plays. If I know how to play it myself, I often can remember the times I spent struggling to get my own fingers to move correctly to make the same symphony of notes. This in turn makes me appreciate the song more, and almost feel the emotions the artist put into the song itself.

In Cory Turner’s article, they examined a study with children who had less than a year’s worth of music training and compared it to children with two years of music training. In the study, they found the more experienced kids had increased brain activity in their temporal lobes, where auditory noise is processed. Turner’s article stated, “In addition to that ‘neural noise,’ as Kraus calls it, ability to process sound — like telling the difference between someone saying ‘ba’ and ‘ga’ — requires microsecond precision in the brain. And many kids raised in poverty, Kraus says, simply have a harder time doing it; individual sounds can seem ‘blurry’ to the brain” (Turner). A heat map, used to show the brainwaves of the children studied, had a much darker spot when they processed frequency pitches of language, indicating they were faster and more precise at understanding sounds and languages being spoken to them.

On the other end of the spectrum, Lorna Jakobsen conducted her study on adults with either music training or no training at all. In her study, she focused on both verbal and visual memory recall between the two groups of adults. Jakobsen says while addressing her results, “formal music training is multifaceted and designed to support the development of a range of skills including attention and concentration, music reading, fine motor control, emotional expression, abstraction, memorization, and more” (Jakobsen 50) which explains why her research showed an increased score in IQ for the group of musicians.

“Alexa, Put My Sad Girl Playlist On”

Think about the playlist you put on either when you are studying, doing chores around the house, or just needing some background noise to break the silence. What do you play? Is it downer music that’s slow and melancholic, or is it music with a faster, upbeat tempo that you enjoy? Despite what previous research says about the Mozart Effect, I can’t bring myself to listen to classical music during any task that requires my attention. I feel as though I start to bore myself to sleep if I attempt to. Instead, I put on my general playlist with my favorite hits, mostly consisting of punk and grunge from the 90s. A vast difference from what studies say I should listen to, but why is it that this genre helps me in my own way?

Cyn Meyer reviews a study by Alice Mado Proverbio that collected data on participants who listened to auditory background noise and emotionally impactful music. They found that the emotionally touching music significantly boosted things such as their heart rate, along with memory recall. She doesn’t leave it at that though, and reviews the negative effects of music as well, stating, “that’s not to say that all music is helpful for memory… Here are some caveats: listening to some music, especially complex music, can interrupt memorization. Silence can sometimes be more effective for certain memorization tasks. Background music can have a slightly negative effect on memorization and can sometimes interfere with certain cognitive functioning.” (Meyer 5:08-5:26).

On the other hand, Lutz Jäncke did their own study where they played popular songs from the past to participants and asked them a set of questions about the music. They found that “on average, 30% of the presented songs evoked autobiographical memories. In addition, most of the songs also evoked various strong emotions, which were mainly positive ones such as nostalgia.” (Jäncke 4). They revealed that most of these memories were what they called, “valenced (intrinsically pleasant) and arousing (stimulating) events” (Jäncke 4). In summary, participants were able to recall detailed memories of their past when they were listening to previous popular songs.

Music and Memory, So What?

So, what does all this research mean? It seems like there’s a back-and-forth between it either being helpful or distracting and not all music is the same. In an interview performed by Scott Young, Dr. Barbara Oakley illustrated a picture of a medical student studying the functions of a heart at a coffee shop, answering the question, “…you’ll be studying away and then somebody will click a cup, or they’ll be this kind of clink, or a little conversation, and what that little disruption does is momentarily it draws you into default mode activity… that momentary respite kind of gives you a bigger picture perspective on whatever you’re learning.” (Young). Similarly, music can help draw you back into the bigger-picture perspective of how the heart works. She goes on to explain how people in memory competitions often block all noise out when they are attempting to memorize lists and words. This is in conjunction with what Janina Lehmann says about the disruption from music, “Background music is not related to the task, but can attract the learner’s attention and therefore can be defined as a seductive detail (Rey, 2012). Such information distracts the learner from the main task, i.e., the learning task, and therefore hinders learning” (Lehmann). One final study on the specific genre played while studying memorized lists concluded,

“the results of the experiment revealed that participants in Group A (no music) had obtained the highest score for short-term and long-term memory with the median of 15 and 10, respectively, followed by Group D (rock music) with a median score of 15 (for short-term memory) and 8 (for long-term memory). While Group C (country music) obtained the lowest score with a median of 11 (for short-term memory) and 3.5 (for long-term memory)” (Prabhu 853).

In conclusion, what can we take away from the use of music and memory recall? We can see through research that music is beneficial for learning and shaping the brain, as shown in the study recited by Cory Turner. We also see it helps with memory of events if you have high arousal while listening. Yet we see as well with research, that participants who use music to study a list for memorization were unable to stand up to others in silence. In the interview with Scott Young, Dr. Barbara Oakly explains it well, indicating that you should be in silence when you need to accurately memorize words, lists, or tasks. When it comes to studying, these would be subjects like history, language arts, and psychology where you need to learn the specific theory names. On the other hand, when you need to look at things in the bigger picture and bring your attention back in, it’s good to have music on for a momentary distraction. This is good for subjects like math and science when you’re trying to find the full function. We do see that using music in pedagogy is also helpful for memorization, specifically using your own songs for things like lists, such as the ABCs or times tables in math. Finally, we also can note that, if you are using music in the background for your studies, it is important to listen to music you enjoy that sparks a positive mood, as described in the Arousal-Mood Hypothesis.

Works Cited

Jakobson, Lorna S., et al. “Memory for Verbal and Visual Material in Highly Trained Musicians.” Music Perception, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, pp. 41-55. ProQuest, https://login.dist.lib.usu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/memory-verbal-visual-material-highly-trained/docview/2656718095/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2008.26.1.41.

Jäncke, Lutz. “Music, memory and emotion.” Journal of biology vol. 7, no. 6, 21. 8 Aug. 2008, pp. #, doi:10.1186/jbiol82.

Lehmann, Janina A M, and Tina Seufert. “The Influence of Background Music on Learning in the Light of Different Theoretical Perspectives and the Role of Working Memory Capacity.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 8 1902. 31 Oct. 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01902.

Meyer, Cyn. “What Research Says: Can Music Improve Memory?” YouTube, uploaded by Second Wind Movement, 25 May 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBlq0taO2W4.

“Music and Pedagogy: The Role of Cultural and Demographic Variables.” International Social Science Review, vol. 100, no. 1, Apr. 2024, pp. 1-23. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A791356749/AONE?u=utah_gvrl&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=08c6fd73. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Prabhu, P., et al. “An experimental study on the effect of background music on memory recall among medical students.” Journal of Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences University, vol. 17, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 2022, p. 853. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A737280465/AONE?u=utah_gvrl&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=3d5181ab. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Turner, Cory. “This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Music.” NPR, NPR, 10 Sept. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/09/10/343681493/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-music.

Young, Scott. “Should You Listen to Music While Studying, The Pi Model and More w/ Dr. Barb Oakley.” YouTube, 27 May 2007.