Learning with background music

Studying with Learners’ Own Music: Preliminary Findings on Concentration and Task Load

“…For instance, in a study probing people's music usage patterns in various contexts (e.g., reading, at the office) [17], a set of music features (i.e., music emotion, loudness) were found to make larger contributions to the music usage prediction in studying-related settings than other features such as tonal feature and genre. This observation is generally consistent with a recent study in the learning analytics community which reported that the happiness and energy levels of music were positively correlated with one's learning engagement [8].…”

“…Given these theoretical assumptions, studies have propounded that, in order to optimize background music for facilitating learning, the appropriate type of music should be chosen [1], [13], especially in view of the types of learning tasks being performed [8]. The need for empirical evidence on this issue has motivated a range of research efforts from related fields including education, psychology, and music information retrieval (MIR).…”

“…In the learning science community, efforts has been made to reveal the associations between characteristics of background music and listeners' learning performance (e.g., [3], [15]) and learning engagement (e.g., [6], [8]). For instance, [15] compared learners' reading comprehension performance when they were presented with (1) music with a low information load (i.e., less rhythmic and tonal variation), ( 2) music with a high information load (i.e., dissonant, more variations in rhythm and dynamics), or in (3) silent condition.…”

“…For instance, music pieces with a high tempo were reported to be detrimental to students' learning performance in [5], but showed no effect in other relevant work (e.g., [6], [7]). With regard to these inconsistent results, recent work has pointed out that the inconclusive findings reported in the literature might have been confounded by the ecological validity and the representativeness of music stimuli employed in the laboratory experiment [1], [8]. Specifically, most of the existing research has employed a laboratory-based experiment design, where each music trait condition was often represented by a single pre-selected music piece.…”

“…A larger and real-world pool of music pieces is thus necessary to further our understanding of how background music impacts learning and to enhance the ecological validity of our research findings. On the other hand, although the complexity of learning tasks has been suggested to moderate the interaction between background music and listeners' learning process [4], [7], few studies have probed the effects of background music under varying levels of task load (except for [8]'s preliminary work), probably due to the difficulty in designing a wide range of naturalistic learning tasks in the laboratory settings.…”