“I don’t know how you can study with that music blaring!” 
“I don’t know how you can work without it!” 

Is background music a distraction when studying? Or is it possible that it helps? What does the science say about working with music in the background? It turns out there’s no cut-and-dried answer to the question. Rather, a range of factors can influence how music affects cognitive performance. The type of music makes a difference, as does the type of task you’re engaged in. Music can have different effects on cognitive tasks such as reading or making judgments compared to physical tasks such as exercise or gardening, and the same music can affect people in different ways.  

Music and behaviour 
There are three major aspects of music that can affect our behaviour. The first is the overall speed of the music, including not just tempo but how much is happening during each measure. Faster and louder music will generally increase what scientists call physiological arousal, leading to increased heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, whereas slow, soft music will tend to decrease these things. High arousal music has been shown to increase performance speed in all sorts of tasks, including physical and cognitive ones. This is what’s at the root of the “Mozart Effect”— listening to up-tempo music like certain Mozart pieces increases alertness and improves performance on tests of attention and executive function (at least, over the short term). There is also clear evidence that listening to faster music can improve the speed of physical tasks, such as exercise, sports, and even drinking water! This is likely due to the way your body naturally entrains or synchronizes to the rhythmic cycles in music.  

Evoking emotion 
The second factor is how enjoyable the music is. This can be due to the valence of the music — the spectrum of emotion it evokes in us, including whether it is in a major or minor key — but also our prior experiences with the music. Music that is familiar and enjoyable can lift our mood and subsequent cognitive performance, but may also be distracting in cases where its enjoyment takes us away from the task at hand. There is even evidence that our own temperament can moderate this effect—introverts seem to be more distracted by high-arousal and familiar music than do extraverts (which might relate to how sensitive you are to outside stimuli). 

The effect of lyrics 
The final factor is whether the music has lyrics or not. Music with lyrics is often enjoyable, but it has been shown to decrease performance in cognitive tasks, especially reading and certain forms of verbal memory. This is likely because of the shared cognitive burden of the tasks. Music with lyrics will compete with the written word for the use of the neural networks that comprehend language, leading to slower performance. This hypothesis would also predict that less comprehensible lyrics, such as those in a foreign language, would actually be less distracting, since they wouldn’t compete for the same brain resources.  

So there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for whether you should have music in the background when you study. It depends on the type of music you listen to, the type of task you’re engaged in, and the type of person you are. Soft jazz may be good for studying, heavy metal may be good for working out, and classical symphonies may be good for focused attention — but your results may vary. The important thing is to try out different genres for yourself and determine what kind of music (if any) works for you!