No matter the genre, music provides society with a myriad of purposes. From an education standpoint, students can use it to help them study. Outside the classroom, music can have a role in sports. On the field, it can have an impact in practice or an athlete’s mindset prior to an upcoming game. In general, people use it to reinvigorate themselves when they must push on with tiring work. With so many people enjoying tunes as they work — as services like Spotify report millions of monthly users — it causes one to consider whether music exhibits a noticeable effect on one’s performance and productivity.
The major benefit one can receive from music comes from how it appears to help productivity stay consistent. The University of Maryland’s Global Campus and the journal MATEC Web of Conferences discuss how music listeners exhibited higher levels of focus on their goals. This logically increases productivity and performance of students and athletes, since one would suffer from fewer distractions and would get more done when listening to music than they would otherwise.
Of course, music also increases one’s mood thanks to neurological transmitters. One may hear the term ‘dopamine’ tossed around when people discuss joyful things, referring to a brain-laden chemical that becomes more prominent when performing enjoyable actions and is responsible for “feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation” according to HealthDirect. Therefore, if one enjoys music, then their brain will release dopamine as a response, which would boost one’s mood and help them get through otherwise tiring work. In turn, this can lead to athletes having a stronger preparation process for a practice or game.
One inevitable question comes from whether certain types of music deliver greater mental benefits. Classical music stands out as a candidate for the most beneficial type of music to listen to, as Harvard’s Health Publishing discusses a psychological study wherein people who listened to Mozart performed better on several tasks than those who did not. However, this benefit is not exclusive to the work of the famous Austrian composer, as journals like Personality and Individual Differences note studies wherein participants listened to both “vocal and instrumental” tracks and performed relatively better on certain tasks than those who did not listen to any music.
One must also note how these studies noted a minor yet potential harm that music inflicts in certain circumstances. A study found in the book Topics in Cognitive Psychology mentions how a few participants did worse on tasks involving “reading comprehension” than those without music. However, not only was the overall difference between groups in this study relatively minute, but some tasks understandably require focus intense enough to make any external stimuli detrimental. The crucial thing to take away from this article is not that music is “harmful” in certain circumstances, but rather one must understand their work and know if they need to modulate their habits to continue getting the most out of the several mental benefits music delivers, whether that be in the classroom or on the field.
