Nature sounds
Let’s start with the elephant in the room – or the sounds of nature in your headphones. We already know that time spent in nature improves our overall well-being: it lowers our stress levels, helps regulate our mood, and improves our attention.
However, even if you don’t want to get out much in a cold winter, you can still get some benefits just by tuning into a nature sounds playlist – or even by opening a window to get some fresh air (birds chirp in winter, too!). Studies show that natural sounds from open windows improve attention, memory, and comfort; there is also evidence that listening to natural sounds regularly during academic tasks can improve attention, induce flow state, and boost psychological well-being. Importantly, these should be low-volume, steady sounds, without much variation throughout (e.g. gentle rain, ocean waves, etc.).
Music
With music, things get a little more complicated. It seems like a lot depends on the kind of music you are listening to and the task you are doing. For instance, songs or any music with lyrics could be detrimental if you are working with words – reading, writing, or memorizing. On the other hand, a different metareview demonstrates a small positive effect of background music, especially classical music, on learning and additionally highlights the benefits of background music prior to a learning test.
As lo-fi beats for studies continue to be popular online, we looked into studies involving them, too. One study showed that instrumental lo-fi hip-hop didn’t reliably harm or improve performance in various tasks, while music with lyrics proved detrimental to task performance. Other studies have found that personality traits may play a role, too, with extraverts benefitting from music more than introverts, although more research is needed on the topic to make a reliable conclusion.
Generally, it would seem that listening to music during the task may not always be optimal (mixing reading with songs), but listening to some favorites before you start doing an assignment might boost your mood and improve motivation. And if you do need to have something in the background, it’s better to choose something without lyrics, on low-to-moderate volume, and based on your preferences.
White noise
White noise is another popular choice as a studying background. It is a continuous sound that contains all audible frequencies at equal intensity, a way to “mask” external distracting noises. While in this case, too, there is not one clear conclusion, there is evidence suggesting that white noise can be beneficial for children with attention deficits, helping them perform better at standard experimental tasks. This same study demonstrated that white noise had the opposite effect for the control group (attentive participants) – by contrast, their performance worsened. Conversely, another study demonstrated that learning new words was facilitated by white noise in healthy young adults. Just like with music, it seems that the effect of white noise is largely determined by the task at hand and personal preference.
What to choose
- If you want a surefire option: nature sounds at lower volumes with not a lot of versatility.
- If you want some diversity: experiment with different music genres or white noise, but keep the volume low, too. Try several genres on one type of task, so as to see what feels best; the golden rule, though, is not to mix songs or any music with lyrics and verbal tasks like reading or writing.
- Include silence in your experiments: it may well be that you’ll find it works best in some cases (after all, in every experiment, it is the control condition).
- If possible, compare not only your perception of your performance but your actual performance of a task.
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