By Rohan Anne, Webmaster
We’ve all had the impulsive need to plug our headphones or earbuds in and tune out with relaxing, enjoyable music while we complete our dull and tedious homework. I’ve often found myself turning to musical comfort when trying to complete 30-page-long world history notes or long wordy math problems. It just made doing the extremely boring work easier when I had something I could enjoy listening to.
But one weekend, I conducted an experiment out of curiosity. After spending a day listening to my favorite playlist while studying on Saturday, I forced myself to keep my earbuds in a different room while working on Sunday. Shockingly, what took me four hours on Saturday had been reduced to nearly half the amount of time and effort on Sunday.
After working with music through all of high school, I’ve realized that while it made my assignments less boring, it became a distraction while trying to make my work its best quality. I was focusing on the music rather than my assignment, and I wasn’t using the full scope of my creativity toward producing high-caliber work.
A 2019 study by the research journal Applied Cognitive Psychology tried to test music’s effect on creativity through three different experiments, having subjects either listen to background music with foreign lyrics, music with lyrics in the listener’s language or instrumental music with no lyrics. The study measured their performance in comparison to a control group with silent background noise while listening to music on Compound Remote Associate Tasks (CRATs), a type of problem-solving task. No matter the genre of music, everyone with background music experienced reduced levels of creativity and a greater inability to complete CRATs than when they had a quiet environment.
Even though music might motivate you to complete monotonous work, constantly blaring music through your ears is another distraction we’re convinced is good, just like constantly checking our phones or scrolling on social media. In the end, we’ll start to focus more on the lyrics or the beat of the song rather than the details or instructions of your assignments.
Music isn’t just bad for assignments that require focus and creativity; listening to music while studying will impact any kind of memorization or active recall needecd for a test. In a research study in Psychology of Music, two groups read the same article and attempted to recall information from it, but one group listened to music while the other group had no background noise. Compared to the group with no music, the music listeners had more trouble recalling specific details from the reading and were more disturbed during the reading process.
Sure, we could use calm music while doing easy assignments and make that work less boring or daunting, but there isn’t truly any assignment in high school where you don’t have to think creatively or memorize information. We can’t justify listening to music as productive when all it’s doing is hindering our productivity for these assignments. So try taking your earbuds out next time you sit down to memorize definitions or take notes — see how you can whittle down hours of work into minutes.
Rohan Anne can be reached at [email protected].
