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(This article originally appeared in Issue 402 of The Big Issue Australia. Thanks again to Bill and Vicky for taking time to talk to me, to Doug Wallen for editing it super-professionally, and Eirian Chapman for the great art. And it’s been great to have students in my lectures come up to me and say “I read your article in the Big Issue and really enjoyed it” - I hadn’t mentioned it in class)

Tuning In

Chances are, you spend a big chunk of your life looking at words. The 70% of Australian workers with a white-collar job often have to read documents, from emails and briefs to memos and press releases. Uni students and schoolkids slave over textbooks and Wikipedia. And there’s a very good chance you’re reading this article right now.

Many people also listen to music while reading; background music for work or study is among the most common reasons for listening to music, according to a 2004 study led by psychology professor Patrik N. Juslin of Uppsala University in Sweden.

Reading is a difficult thing for a brain to do. It takes years of practice and hard work to be able to read fluently, which is why you spent so long in English class. Even once you’re a fluent reader, concentrating on reading requires a lot of cognitive resources. It uses your ability to decipher meaning, join the dots, put things in context and, of course, resist the temptation to look at pictures of cute animals instead.

Considering that difficulty, listening to music at the same time should be about as distracting as, say, your bladder being full. If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re good at multitasking, think again: research shows that humans are nowhere near as good at multitasking as we think. In fact, a 2009 study led by Stanford University researcher Eyal Ophir and colleagues found that people who prefer to multitask are worse at multitasking than people who prefer doing one thing at a time.

So, based on how difficult reading is and how bad we are at doing two things at once, you’d assume that listening to music would be a bad idea.

However, a recent study led by psychology professor William Forde Thompson at Macquarie University found that listening to music has surprisingly little effect on reading comprehension. “I can’t listen to music when I’m reading or working – I findit immensely distracting unless that music is very quiet and not too frenetic, and even then I usually like it turned off,” says Thompson. “But I also have friends who love reading and working while listening to music.”

Curious as to why this was, Thompson and colleagues asked students to read passages of text while listening to excerpts of a Mozart piano sonata that were either soft or loud and either fast or slow. They then tested the students’ comprehension of the text. They found that the only kind of music that reduced comprehension was both fast and loud.

“You’d think that music would be hugely distracting,” Thompson observes. “But in many ways, the big take-home message is that music is so very benign.”

Thompson and colleagues argue that one possible reason for this surprising finding is that, though music is distracting, it usually puts you in a better mood. And improving your mood increases your IQ and thus your reading ability. “No one knows how [music] improves intellectual function,” shares Thompson, “but it probably does it by enhancing sustained attention or working memory.”

Dr. Victoria Williamson, who runs the excellent website musicpsychology.co.uk and lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, is impressed by Thompson’s study. “If their effect is replicable,” she says, “then it stands as an interesting contribution in its own right to our knowledge of what we potentially find distracting about music.”

However, Williamson points out one big difference between the piano sonatas used in Thompson’s study and the kind of music most people listen to: lyrics. “I suspect that the authors would have got a very different result if they had used vocal music,” she states. “Introspection leads me to believe that vocal music is more distracting to reading comprehension, and there is evidence to back up this assumption.”

Williamson, who tells me she most often listens to classical guitar music while reading, says hearing words is inherently distracting. “It makes sense that there is some pressure for us to attend to [any] language in the environment, even if we do not want to, since it is our main communication tool,” she explains.

Thompson agrees that vocals are likely to be distracting. “We are planning on looking more closely at how music interacts with language,” he says.

So, if you listen to loud, fast music with vocals – say, ‘B.O.B.’ by OutKast or ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ by Bob Dylan – should you stop when you have to read carefully? According to Thompson, “There are probably individual differences in this effect, so even death-metal might not interfere with reading comprehension for every person. But I bet it interferes with reading comprehension for most of the population.”

What, then, should you listen to? Williamson says music is more likely to be distracting if you dislike it and if you’re unfamiliar with it. So you may be best off listening to old favourites when you study, so long as the music isn’t too wordy or too loud.

Personally, I wrote some of this article while listening to Brian Eno’s slow, soft, instrumental Ambient 1: Music For Airports (1978), an album I like and am familiar with. It seemed to do the trick.

Tim Byron lectures in psychology at the University of Queensland and criticises #1 singles at the website The Vine.

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