research on music and studying

Does Listening to Music Really Help You Study?

Experts from the department of psychology explain whether or not music is a helpful study habit to use for midterms, finals, and other exams.

By Mia Mercer ‘23

Students have adopted several studying techniques to prepare for exams. Listening to music is one of them. However, listening to music may be more distracting than helpful for effective studying.

There’s no season quite like an exam season on a university campus. Students turn to varying vices to help improve their chance of getting a good grade. While some chug caffeine, others turn up the music as they hit the books.

Although listening to music can make studying more enjoyable, psychologists from the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences have found that this popular study habit is more distracting than beneficial. 

“ Multitasking is a fallacy; human beings are not capable of truly multitasking because attention is a limited resource, and you can only focus on so much without a cost,” cognitive psychologist Brian Anderson said. “So when you’re doing two things at the same time, like studying and listening to music, and one of the things requires cognitive effort, there will be a cost to how much information you can retain doing both activities.” 

In basic terms of memory, Anderson explained that we do a better job of recalling information in the same conditions in which we learn the material. So when studying for an exam, it’s best to mimic the exam conditions. 

“If you have music going on in the background when you study, it’s going to be easier to recall that information if you also have music on in the background when you take the exam,” Anderson said. “However wearing headphones will almost certainly be a violation during most exams, so listening to music when you’re studying will make it harder to replicate that context when you’re taking an exam.” 

Even though experts suggest listening to music can hinder your ability to retain information while studying, some students choose to continue the practice. Steven Smith, cognitive neuroscientist for the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences , provided some suggestions for students who wish to continue this study habit. 

 “In general, words are distracting,” Smith shared. “So if you want to listen to music while you study, try to listen to something that does not have words, or if it does have words, hopefully, it’ll be in a language that you don’t understand at all, otherwise that’s going to distract from the stuff you’re trying to study.”

Smith also suggested listening to familiar background music, because it’s less distracting than something new or exciting. Additionally, Smith provided some principles that generally result in better exam results. 

“Make sure your studying is meaningful because comprehension gets you so much further than raw repetition,” Smith shared. “Also, you must test yourself, because it’s the only way you can learn the material; this is called the testing-effect. And finally, try to apply the spacing-effect, where you spread out your study sessions rather than cramming your studying all together, allowing for better memory of the material.”

Regardless of how students decide to study for exams, it’s important to remember that we all learn differently.

“There are individual differences between everyone,” Smith said. “Some people need a study place that is boring, predictable, and exactly the same so that they can concentrate, and others find it more beneficial to go to different places to study. It’s true that there are different personalities, so try and find what study habit works best for you.” 

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FNU Tips The Benefits of Studying with Music

The Benefits of Studying with Music

Does Music Help You Study?

With that highly detailed Biology exam just around the corner, you have been hitting the books with every spare second you have. During nightly, starlit studying sessions, you continuously trudge past midnight, and the hours multiply. What if there was a more beneficial practice rather than spending hours upon hours of silence studying in your bedroom?

You have likely heard before that music helps you study. But, do you know why parents and professors alike are urging you to tune to iTunes? Studies have shown that music produces several positive effects on a human’s body and brain. Music activates both the left and right brain at the same time, and the activation of both hemispheres can maximize learning and improve memory. Find out music’s effect on your body and brain, and see how to enhance your studying with songs!

Proven to Ease Student Stress

In the middle of a busy semester, students’ stress runs high. This is the perfect reason to study your class notes with music playing, — it is proven to help reduce stress!

Music is a way to process emotions and strengthen their resolve while being overwhelmed. People often turn to the music they can relate to as it helps them deal with stress in this way. So, if university life has got you feeling a bit down, dazed or distracted then it might be a good idea to put some music on while you study. Not only will it help you concentrate on your studies, it will also help keep stress at bay and put you in the learning mood.

Reduce Test Anxiety

Anxiety can become a crippling blockade between students and their textbooks. How can students beat it? Let’s pretend you were offered a free, soothing massage during each study session for the duration of your college years. You would feel lower levels of anxiety and tension as you reviewed your notes. While this might be a difficult feat for the typical college student to attain, the next best thing is readily available to pupils all over the world. Believe it or not, USA Today  reveals, “one study found that music’s effect on anxiety levels is similar to the effect of getting a massage” (Christ). It is official; your favorite tunes can reduce anxiety as much as a massage! Anxiety-stricken students should pop in the earbuds before heading to the library. They will feel relaxed, at ease, and ready to conquer chapter after chapter.

If you’re like many students suffering from anxiety and stress, try listening to rap music while studying. A study done by Cambridge University showed that hip-hop music provides an uplifting effect on its listeners that can help them accept, manage and deal better with mental health issues. There’s more than one genre of rap, so find the one you like if it means giving your brain that extra bit of support it needs.

Improve Your Performance

Music is found to help people perform better in high-pressure situations, such as the bi-annual high-pressure event that is finals week. Studies have shown that music can help students transform from coal to diamonds, shining under pressure. USA Today asks, “Want to sink the game-winning shot when the pressure’s on? Listen to some upbeat tunes before the big game. . . basketball players prone to performing poorly under pressure during games were significantly better during high-pressure free-throw shooting if they first listened to catchy, upbeat music and lyrics”(Christ). This relates to anyone combating high-pressure situations, including you and your studious peers! Grab that 80’s style boom box and turn the volume up!

It can even cure pain!

So, you arrived at the last Conquistadors basketball game, prepared to perform better after a little music therapy. Excited and energized, you played all of your best moves on the court, until you sprained your ankle landing a slam dunk. Ouch! Now, every time you attempt to study, your mind only focuses on the pounding pain in your ankle! Have you tried studying with music? According to USA Today, music is so powerful to the body that it can actually help ease the pain. Studies show that music can meaningfully reduce the perceived intensity of pain, especially in geriatric care, intensive care, or palliative medicine.

Your ankle pain and your midterm stand no chance against your favorite album and focused mind! Similar to how a lullaby would calm you, listening to music can also help you relax as by lowering your blood pressure, easing muscle tension and increasing your attention span.

It will help you focus more

Proven to improve brain functions

Musical activity serves as a cognitive exercise for the brain which trains it for more challenges in the future. Therefore, people who have musical training early on, specifically before age seven, have healthier brains and are less likely to suffer from debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s or Dementia. But you don’t have to wait for a certain age before benefitting from music. Regardless of whether you’re a freshman or senior, you can start exercising your brain now, simply by having your favorite device and earphones handy for any study session.

Music, Memory, Emotions

Several studies in recent years have linked music, memory, and emotion. To back this claim, Petr Janata has conducted two studies to prove that music, memory, and emotion are linked. His initial study found that “music serves as a potent trigger for retrieving memories.” During his second study, Janata took Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of students’ brains as he played popular songs from their childhood and teenage years. “After each excerpt, the student responded to questions about the tune, including whether it was familiar or not, how enjoyable it was, and whether it was associated with any particular incident, episode or memory” (UC Davis) . This study reveals that music, memory, and emotions and strongly linked. This evidence supports the theory that studying while listening to music is a very beneficial practice.

Ever wondered why it’s easier to memorize the lyrics to a song than the periodic table of elements? That’s because your brain looks for patterns to better understand, recall, and process information. It’s the same reason why music producers always put a hook in their songs since what is more commonly known as the earworm or catchy bit.

“Earworm” was coined in 1979 by psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert . It happens when a part of the song gets stuck in your head for an extended period of time and you can’t get it out. It just so happens, this is also one way of improving your brain’s memory, which is why some language courses are set to a musical pattern of ear-catching melodies. Some even suggest that the benefits don’t necessarily depend on the kind of music you listen to, but rather how effectively your brain latches on to the pattern of the song.

End Your Study Session with Classical Music

We now understand that music and memory are strongly linked in the brain, and that music can be beneficial to study. All that studying, however, has made you exhausted! You close the textbooks and lay beneath your blankets, but your mind is still buzzing from all of the information you’ve acquired. Can’t sleep? Well, music can even help you close out the night after studying. “Listening to classical music has been shown to effectively treat insomnia in college students, making it a safe, cheap alternative to sleep-inducing meds” (Christ).

We Want You To Succeed!

Florida National University (FNU) is dedicated to helping our students succeed. While you continue to excel at FNU, please take advantage of our helpful resources. As the semester comes to a close, gain tips from our blog article, “ 10 Ways to Prepare for Your Final Exam ,” and don’t forget your headphones!

If you are not currently enrolled at FNU, browse our programs of study and apply now !

Works Cited

Baker, Mitzi. “Music Moves Brain to Pay Attention.” Stanford School of Medicine. Stanford School of Medicine, 01 Aug. 2007. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

Christ, Scott. “20 Surprising, Science-backed Health Benefits of Music.” USA Today. Gannett, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

“Stress.” University of Maryland Medical Center. University of Maryland Medical Center, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

“Study Finds Brain Hub That Links Music, Memory and Emotion :: UC Davis News & Information.” UC Davis News & Information. UC Davis, 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 03 Apr. 2014.

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EDITORIAL article

Editorial: the impact of music on human development and well-being.

• 1 Department of Culture, Communication and Media, University College London, London, United Kingdom
• 2 Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
• 3 School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
• 4 Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Editorial on the Research Topic The Impact of Music on Human Development and Well-Being

Music is one of the most universal ways of expression and communication for humankind and is present in the everyday lives of people of all ages and from all cultures around the world ( Mehr et al., 2019 ). Hence, it seems more appropriate to talk about musics (plural) rather than in the singular ( Goble, 2015 ). Furthermore, research by anthropologists as well as ethnomusicologists suggests that music has been a characteristic of the human condition for millennia (cf. Blacking, 1976 ; Brown, 1999 ; Mithen, 2005 ; Dissanayake, 2012 ; Higham et al., 2012 ; Cross, 2016 ). Nevertheless, whilst the potential for musical behavior is a characteristic of all human beings, its realization is shaped by the environment and the experiences of individuals, often within groups ( North and Hargreaves, 2008 ; Welch and McPherson, 2018 ). Listening to music, singing, playing (informally, formally), creating (exploring, composing, improvising), whether individually and collectively, are common activities for the vast majority of people. Music represents an enjoyable activity in and of itself, but its influence goes beyond simple amusement.

These activities not only allow the expression of personal inner states and feelings, but also can bring about many positive effects in those who engage in them. There is an increasing body of empirical and experimental studies concerning the wider benefits of musical activity, and research in the sciences associated with music suggests that there are many dimensions of human life—including physical, social, educational, psychological (cognitive and emotional)—which can be affected positively by successful engagement in music ( Biasutti and Concina, 2013 ). Learning in and through music is something that can happen formally (such as part of structured lessons in school), as well as in other-than-formal situations, such as in the home with family and friends, often non-sequentially and not necessarily intentional, and where participation in music learning is voluntary, rather than mandated, such as in a community setting (cf. Green, 2002 ; Folkestad, 2006 ; Saether, 2016 ; Welch and McPherson, 2018 ).

Such benefits are evidenced across the lifespan, including early childhood ( Gerry et al., 2012 ; Williams et al., 2015 ; Linnavalli et al., 2018 ), adolescence ( McFerran et al., 2018 ), and older adulthood ( Lindblad and de Boise, 2020 ). Within these lifespan perspectives, research into music's contribution to health and well-being provides evidence of physical and psychological impacts ( MacDonald et al., 2013 ; Fancourt and Finn, 2019 ; van den Elzen et al., 2019 ). Benefits are also reported in terms of young people's educational outcomes ( Guhn et al., 2019 ), and successful musical activity can enhance an individual's sense of social inclusion ( Welch et al., 2014 ) and social cohesion ( Elvers et al., 2017 ).

This special issue provides a collection of 21, new research articles that deepen and develop our understanding of the ways and means that music can impact positively on human development and well-being. The collection draws on the work of 88 researchers from 17 different countries across the world, with each article offering an illustration of how music can relate to other important aspects of human functioning. In addition, the articles collectively illustrate a wide range of contemporary research approaches. These provide evidence of how different research aims concerning the wider benefits of music require sensitive and appropriate methodologies.

In terms of childhood and adolescence, for example, Putkinen et al. demonstrate how musical training is likely to foster enhanced sound encoding in 9 to 15-year-olds and thus be related to reading skills. A separate Finnish study by Saarikallio et al. provides evidence of how musical listening influences adolescents' perceived sense of agency and emotional well-being, whilst demonstrating how this impact is particularly nuanced by context and individuality. Aspects of mental health are the focus for an Australian study by Stewart et al. of young people with tendencies to depression. The article explores how, despite existing literature on the positive use of music for mood regulation, music listening can be double-edged and could actually sustain or intensify a negative mood.

A Portuguese study by Martins et al. shifts the center of attention from mental to physical benefits in their study of how learning music can support children's coordination. They provide empirical data on how a sustained, 24-week programme of Orff-based music education, which included the playing of simple tuned percussion instruments, significantly enhanced the manual dexterity and bimanual coordination in participant 8-year-olds compared to their active control (sports) and passive control peers. A related study by Loui et al. in the USA offers insights into the neurological impact of sustained musical instrument practice. Eight-year-old children who play one or more musical instruments for at least 0.5 h per week had higher scores on verbal ability and intellectual ability, and these correlated with greater measurable connections between particular regions of the brain related to both auditory-motor and bi-hemispheric connectivity.

Younger, pre-school children can also benefit from musical activities, with associations being reported between informal musical experiences in the home and specific aspects of language development. A UK-led study by Politimou et al. found that rhythm perception and production were the best predictors of young children's phonological awareness, whilst melody perception was the best predictor of grammar acquisition, a novel association not previously observed in developmental research. In another pre-school study, Barrett et al. explored the beliefs and values held by Australian early childhood and care practitioners concerning the value of music in young children's learning. Despite having limited formal qualifications and experience of personal music learning, practitioners tended overall to have positive attitudes to music, although this was biased toward music as a recreational and fun activity, with limited support for the notion of how music might be used to support wider aspects of children's learning and development.

Engaging in music to support a positive sense of personal agency is an integral feature of several articles in the collection. In addition to the Saarikallio team's research mentioned above, Moors et al. provide a novel example of how engaging in collective beatboxing can be life-enhancing for throat cancer patients in the UK who have undergone laryngectomy, both in terms of supporting their voice rehabilitation and alaryngeal phonation, as well as patients' sense of social inclusion and emotional well-being.

One potential reason for these positive findings is examined in an Australian study by Krause et al. . They apply the lens of self-determination theory to examine musical participation and well-being in a large group of 17 to 85-year-olds. Respondents to an online questionnaire signaled the importance of active music making in their lives in meeting three basic psychological needs embracing a sense of competency, relatedness and autonomy.

The use of public performance in music therapy is the subject of a US study by Vaudreuil et al. concerning the social transformation and reintegration of US military service members. Two example case studies are reported of service members who received music therapy as part of their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and other psychological health concerns. The participants wrote, learned, and refined songs over multiple music therapy sessions and created song introductions to share with audiences. Subsequent interviews provide positive evidence of the beneficial psychological effects of this programme of audience-focused musical activity.

Relatedly, McFerran et al. in Australia examined the ways in which music and trauma have been reported in selected music therapy literature from the past 10 years. The team's critical interpretive synthesis of 36 related articles led them to identify four different ways in which music has been used beneficially to support those who have experienced trauma. These approaches embrace the use of music for stabilizing (the modulation of physiological processes) and entrainment (the synchronization of music and movement), as well as for expressive and performative purposes—the fostering of emotional and social well-being.

The therapeutic potential of music is also explored in a detailed case study by Fachner et al. . Their research focuses on the nature of critical moments in a guided imagery and music session between a music therapist and a client, and evidences how these moments relate to underlying neurological function in the mechanics of music therapy.

At the other end of the age span, and also related to therapy, an Australian study by Brancatisano et al. reports on a new Music, Mind, and Movement programme for people in their eighties with mild to moderate dementia. Participants involved in the programme tended to show an improvement in aspects of cognition, particularly verbal fluency and attention. Similarly, Wilson and MacDonald report on a 10-week group music programme for young Scottish adults with learning difficulties. The research data suggest that participants enjoyed the programme and tended to sustain participation, with benefits evidenced in increased social engagement, interaction and communication.

The role of technology in facilitating access to music and supporting a sense of agency in older people is the focus for a major literature review by Creech , now based in Canada. Although this is a relatively under-researched field, the available evidence suggests that that older people, even those with complex needs, are capable of engaging with and using technology in a variety of ways that support their musical perception, learning and participation and wider quality of life.

Related to the particular needs of the young, children's general behavior can also improve through music, as exampled in an innovative, school-based, intensive 3-month orchestral programme in Italy with 8 to 10-year-olds. Fasano et al. report that the programme was particularly beneficial in reducing hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity, whilst enhancing inhibitory control. These benefits are in line with research findings concerning successful music education with specific cases of young people with ADHD whose behavior is characterized by these same disruptive symptoms (hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity).

Extra-musical benefits are also reported in a study of college students (Bachelors and Masters) and amateur musicians in a joint Swiss-UK study. Antonini Philippe et al. suggest that, whilst music making can offer some health protective effects, there is a need for greater health awareness and promotion among advanced music students. Compared to the amateur musicians, the college music students evaluated their overall quality of life and general and physical health more negatively, as did females in terms of their psychological health. Somewhat paradoxically, the college students who had taken part in judged performances reported higher psychological health ratings. This may have been because this sub-group were slightly older and more experienced musicians.

Music appears to be a common accompaniment to exercise, whether in the gym, park or street. Nikol et al. in South East Asia explore the potential physical benefits of synchronous exercise to music, especially in hot and humid conditions. Their randomized cross-over study (2019) reports that “time-to-exhaustion” under the synchronous music condition was 2/3 longer compared to the no-music condition for the same participants. In addition, perceived exertion was significantly lower, by an average of 22% during the synchronous condition.

Comparisons between music and sport are often evidenced in the body of existing Frontiers research literature related to performance and group behaviors. Our new collection contains a contribution to this literature in a study by Habe et al. . The authors investigated elite musicians and top athletes in Slovenia in terms of their perceptions of flow in performance and satisfaction with life. The questionnaire data analyses suggest that the experience of flow appears to influence satisfaction with life in these high-functioning individuals, albeit with some variations related to discipline, participant sex and whether considering team or individual performance.

A more formal link between music and movement is the focus of an exploratory case study by Cirelli and Trehub . They investigated a 19-month-old infant's dance-like, motorically-complex responses to familiar and unfamiliar songs, presented at different speeds. Movements were faster for the more familiar items at their original tempo. The child had been observed previously as moving to music at the age of 6 months.

Finally, a novel UK-based study by Waddington-Jones et al. evaluated the impact of two professional composers who were tasked, individually, to lead a 4-month programme of group composing in two separate and diverse community settings—one with a choral group and the other in a residential home, both funded as part of a music programme for the Hull City of Culture in 2017. In addition to the two composers, the participants were older adults, with the residential group being joined by schoolchildren from a local Primary school to collaborate in a final performance. Qualitative data analyses provide evidence of multi-dimensional psychological benefits arising from the successful, group-focused music-making activities.

In summary, these studies demonstrate that engaging in musical activity can have a positive impact on health and well-being in a variety of ways and in a diverse range of contexts across the lifespan. Musical activities, whether focused on listening, being creative or re-creative, individual or collective, are infused with the potential to be therapeutic, developmental, enriching, and educational, with the caveat provided that such musical experiences are perceived to be engaging, meaningful and successful by those who participate.

Collectively, these studies also celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which music can be experienced. Reading across the articles might raise a question as to whether or not any particular type of musical experience is seen to be more beneficial compared with another. The answer, at least in part, is that the empirical evidence suggests that musical engagement comes in myriad forms along a continuum of more or less overt activity, embracing learning, performing, composing and improvising, as well as listening and appreciating. Furthermore, given the multidimensional neurological processing of musical experience, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it is perhaps the level of emotional engagement in the activity that drives its degree of health and well-being efficacy as much as the activity's overt musical features. And therein are opportunities for further research!

Author Contributions

The editorial was drafted by GW and approved by the topic Co-editors. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the Edited Collection, and have approved this editorial for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to all the contributing authors and their participants for their positive engagement with this Frontiers Research Topic, and also for the Frontiers staff for their commitment and support in bringing this topic to press.

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Williams, K. E., Barrett, M. S., Welch, G. F., Abad, V., and Broughton, M. (2015). Associations between early shared music activities in the home and later child outcomes: findings from the longitudinal study of Australian Children. Early Childhood Res. Q. 31, 113–124. doi: 10.1016/j.ecresq.2015.01.004

Keywords: music, wider benefits, lifespan, health, well-being

Citation: Welch GF, Biasutti M, MacRitchie J, McPherson GE and Himonides E (2020) Editorial: The Impact of Music on Human Development and Well-Being. Front. Psychol. 11:1246. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01246

Received: 12 January 2020; Accepted: 13 May 2020; Published: 17 June 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Welch, Biasutti, MacRitchie, McPherson and Himonides. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Graham F. Welch, graham.welch@ucl.ac.uk ; Michele Biasutti, michele.biasutti@unipd.it

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Is it OK to listen to music while studying?

October 17, 2019

UOW researcher answers this tricky question as NSW students start written exams for the HSC.

It’s a good question! In a nutshell, music puts us in a better mood, which makes us better at studying – but it also distracts us, which makes us worse at studying.

So if you want to study effectively with music, you want to reduce how distracting music can be, and increase the level to which the music keeps you in a good mood.

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do adults think video games are bad?

Music can put us in a better mood

You may have heard of the Mozart effect – the idea that listening to Mozart makes you “smarter”. This is based on research that found listening to complex classical music like Mozart improved test scores, which the researcher argued was based on the music’s ability to stimulate parts of our minds that play a role in mathematical ability.

However, further research conclusively debunked the Mozart effect theory: it wasn’t really anything to do with maths, it was really just that music puts us in a better mood.

Research conducted in the 1990s found a “Blur Effect” – where kids who listened to the BritPop band Blur seemed to do better on tests. In fact, researchers found that the Blur effect was bigger than the Mozart effect, simply because kids enjoyed pop music like Blur more than classical music.

Being in a better mood likely means that we try that little bit harder and are willing to stick with challenging tasks.

Music can distract us

On the other hand, music can be a distraction – under certain circumstances.

When you study, you’re using your “working memory” – that means you are holding and manipulating several bits of information in your head at once.

The research is fairly clear that when there’s music in the background, and especially music with vocals, our working memory gets worse .

Likely as a result, reading comprehension decreases when people listen to music with lyrics . Music also appears to be more distracting for people who are introverts than for people who are extroverts, perhaps because introverts are more easily overstimulated.

Some clever work by an Australia-based researcher called Bill Thompson and his colleagues aimed to figure out the relative effect of these two competing factors - mood and distraction.

They had participants do a fairly demanding comprehension task, and listen to classical music that was either slow or fast, and which was either soft or loud.

They found the only time there was any real decrease in performance was when people were listening to music that was both fast and loud (that is, at about the speed of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift, at about the volume of a vacuum cleaner).

But while that caused a decrease in performance, it wasn’t actually that big a decrease. And other similar research also failed to find large differences.

So… can I listen to music while studying or not?

To sum up: research suggests it’s probably fine to listen to music while you’re studying - with some caveats.

It’s better if:

• it puts you in a good mood
• it’s not too fast or too loud
• it’s less wordy (and hip-hop, where the words are rapped rather than sung, is likely to be even more distracting)
• you’re not too introverted.

Happy listening and good luck in your exams!

Read more: Curious Kids: Why do old people hate new music?

Timothy Byron , Lecturer in Psychology, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

UOW academics exercise academic freedom by providing expert commentary, opinion and analysis on a range of ongoing social issues and current affairs. This expert commentary reflects the views of those individual academics and does not necessarily reflect the views or policy positions of the University of Wollongong.

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Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds

August 1, 2007 - By Mitzi Baker

STANFORD, Calif. - Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general. Their findings are published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron .

This 20-second clip of a subject's fMRI illustrates how cognitive activity increases in anticipation of the transition points between movements.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon , PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

"These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process," said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants' brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a "striking" difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain's evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change - the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement - activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

"The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music," said Jonathan Berger , PhD, associate professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music's underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear - for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony - triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study "may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations," said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin , PhD, a music psychologist from McGill University who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession .

Chris Chafe , PhD, the Duca Family Professor of Music at Stanford, also contributed to this work. This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada , the National Science Foundation , the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund, the National Institutes of Health and a Stanford graduate fellowship. The fMRI analysis was performed at the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory .

• Mitzi Baker

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu .

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Music scientists find the connection between music and emotion: ‘Our neurons dance to the same rhythm’

Three independent scientific studies analyze how the human brain transforms notes into feelings, a mystery that has intrigued psychologists and musicologists for decades.

There is always music. In almost every religion the rituals are underscored with songs, and so too are the life stages of millions of people from birth to death. Sports teams and entire countries condense their identity into a song, which they turn into their official anthem. Music features in every part of our lives, from the most public to the most intimate. Lovers have “our song.” Separations are marked with songs about bitterness, survival, or melancholy . Festivals are eternally linked to singing and dancing. Then there are birthdays, and the holidays. There are whole albums that we associate with feelings and that have the power to take us to a time, a place, or a person. Music is one of the elements that moves us the most — and knows best how to move us. What we don’t really know is why.

For decades, psychologists and neurologists have been trying to understand how the brain perceives music, observing which cells and circuits come into play. Is it an exclusively human trait, or are other animals, such as birds and some dogs, equally musical? Are there such things as universal rhythms, or why does live music excite us more than recorded music? This month, three independent studies have attempted to shed more light on the issue.

Sascha Frühholz , a professor at the Neuroscience Unit at the University of Zurich, is the lead author of one of them. He has spent years studying how emotion is transmitted through sound. He admits that the topic has been widely explored, but it is one in which he has found certain gaps. “There are hardly any studies that analyze live music, and I think that something that we all know on a personal level is that we feel the music more intensely at a concert,” he explains in a telephone conversation.

To scientifically demonstrate this intuition, Frühholz had an audience of 19 volunteers listen to two pianists. The concerts were not particularly comfortable. The audience (only one person per recital) was not sitting, but lying on a stretcher, and this was brought into a huge magnetic resonance scanner to read how their brain reacted to the music. “Yes, it was quite strange,” the expert confesses with a laugh.

Sometimes a recorded song would be played. In other experiments, the musician started playing a song and could see the listener’s brain scan live. “We asked the pianist to try to change the way he played to adapt to brain activity,” explains Frühholz. “One of the reasons why live music has a stronger effect on the listener is the musician’s ability to change something in the performance, and if the change happens in the same direction in the audience and with the same intensity, we think that there is a synchronicity.” Synchrony is a kind of musical empathy. It is a communion between the performer and the listener that does not occur with recorded music. The study confirmed this idea , and the brain activity detected while listening to recorded songs was considerably less than when listening live.

Connection with the audience

“Artists usually look for connection with the audience,” psychologist Rosana Corbacho, who has specialized in treating musicians and other professionals in the sector for several years, explains via audio message. “You have to know how to surf those emotional waves to be present and open to connecting with the audience. Feeling the same emotions or evoking certain emotions at a concert is described as one of the most intense experiences in the life of an artist,” she reflects.

This feeling of belonging, of being part of something, serves as an emotional amplifier, magnifying the effects of music on an audience that reacts in unison to the same stimulus. It is something that is appreciated in present-day concerts or performances, but it worked in the same way in prehistoric rites with music and dancing in front of the fire. “There are studies where it has been observed that the rhythm of the heartbeat is synchronized in some way to the audience that is dancing to a DJ session in a club,” says Corbacho. “It’s as if our neurons dance to the same beat.”

This musical communion partly explains how in recent years, when recorded music can be reproduced at a much higher quality than in the past, concerts and festivals have grown in importance to become one of the pillars of the music industry. In 2017, live music revenues in the world amounted to $18.1 billion, according to the Statista portal. In 2023, they topped $30.1 billion. The figures seem to come as no surprise to Frühholz. “If you think about it, music was born to be heard live. Only in the last hundred or so years — thanks to technology — have we started to listen to recorded music,” he argues.

Frühholz’s study supports these ideas, but the expert recognizes certain limitations, such as the lack of emotional contagion, as there was only one listener, and the greater potential that the pianist had to adapt to his audience, not only because it was small, but for his ability to almost literally read their mind. It is difficult to think that at a Taylor Swift concert , which brings together an average of 70,000 listeners, the artist can adapt to each and every member of the audience’s feelings. “It’s true,” the expert acknowledges, “but with pop singers like her the connection is easier because the public knows the lyrics of the songs. And you must also take emotional contagion into consideration.” The audience in a massive concert tends to harmonize feelings and behave almost as a single listener.

The tribe that danced to the rhythm of ‘Jingle Bells’

The following study did not take place in a Swiss laboratory, but in the Bolivian jungle. There, after days sailing through the Amazon, a group of scientists arrived to ask the Tsimane tribe about rhythms, sounds, and musicality. Nori Jacoby, a psychologist at MIT, led the experiment, which has recently been published in Nature . “It would have been more comfortable to do it from the couch,” he admits sarcastically, “but it wasn’t like that. We did on-site testing with more than 900 people from 15 countries.” Many came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive rhythmic patterns not found in Western music. And an extra effort was made to look for profiles with little internet access to prevent their musical tastes from being too homogeneous, explains Jacoby, who currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt.

The idea was to expose these people to certain musical patterns and ask them to replicate the rhythm with taps of their fingers to see how wrong they were when imitating standardized rhythms they had heard before. “It was similar to the game of broken telephone,” says the expert. “As the game progressed, participants became more and more inclined to act out what they thought they heard rather than what they were actually hearing. This iterative process thus revealed the expectations and natural tendencies that each listener has.”

This is the first large-scale cross-cultural study of musical rhythm. “It provides the clearest evidence to date that there is some degree of universality in musical perception and cognition,” the expert says. All the groups that were analyzed showed biases towards simple integer proportions. “We know that the human brain contains mechanisms that favor these types of constant rhythms,” says Jacoby. That would explain the universality of the 1:1:2 ratio that we hear in Jingle Bells , but also in traditional songs in almost all cultures, even the most isolated ones. “Evidently, these preferences may come from a natural tendency to have constant or isochronous pulsations,” the expert concludes.

From tribal music to electronic music. The last study to be reviewed analyzed how the latter can cause listeners to dissociate and alter their states of consciousness. It was led by Raquel Aparicio Terrés, a psychologist at the University of Barcelona. To carry out the research, he recruited 19 people aged between 18 and 22 and made them listen to six excerpts of electronic music at tempos of 99 beats per minute (bpm), 135 bpm, and 171 bpm. The researchers used electroencephalography, which measures electrical activity in the brain, to measure participants’ neural synchronization with music.

The synchronization between brain activity and the rhythm of the music occurred at all three tempos, but was most pronounced at 99 bpm, a rhythm which can be heard in this song (and which is similar to that of commercial hits such as Hello, Goodbye by The Beatles or Crazy in Love by Beyoncé).

Aparicio Terrés explains in the study that the results may have two medical implications. On the one hand, the understanding of the brain mechanisms that underlie altered states of consciousness, such as a coma or the vegetative state. And on the other hand, the knowledge and use of “non-invasive external techniques that facilitate desirable states of distancing from reality, especially in clinical environments such as intensive care units.”

“Using the science of music to relieve stress, anxiety, or alter states of consciousness is something that has been studied for a long time,” says Corbacho, who gives examples such as the Moonai application that uses sounds and music with which it promises to reduce menstrual pain. “We have used music to alter our emotional reactions throughout our evolution. As [psychologist] Guillermo Dalia says, before we could communicate with words, we used rhythms.”

However, until now we did not understand the mechanisms that translate these notes into emotions. What makes a song move us to dance, convey anguish, or make us cry. We do not completely understand it now either. The studies above, and many others, are beginning to shed light on the enigmatic black box that is our brain. And they promise to reveal if there is a certain universality in these feelings, if the most famous songs in history are nothing more than mathematical formulas capable of hitting the right keys not only musically, but also neurologically speaking.

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Song Lyrics Have Become Angrier, Simpler and More Repetitive, Scientists Find

An analysis of more than 12,000 rap, pop, country, rock and R&B songs from the past 50 years shows more emotional and straightforward lyrics

Christian Thorsberg

Daily Correspondent

In recent years, the growing availability of  personalized music data has made many listeners more perceptive of their own tastes and tendencies. But measuring how music itself has changed—across genres and decades—is an arguably more daunting task. Now, scientists have tried to do just that.

A new study published last week in the journal Scientific Reports  analyzed thousands of English-language songs released between 1970 and 2020 to better understand how music’s content, construction and tone are evolving. The team of European scientists examined five of the Western world’s most popular music genres: rap, pop, country, rock and R&B.

In all, the team found that lyrics over the past 50 years have generally become more personal, straightforward and charged with negative emotions—a trend, the researchers hypothesize, that reflects both society’s mood and the changing landscape of how music is enjoyed.

Scientists began by building a music database using the online platform last.fm , with lyrics pulled in from genius.com . From an initial pool of 582,759 full songs to choose from, they narrowed their data set to 353,320—then analyzed the lyrics for traits like complexity, readability, structure, rhyme and emotion. Next, artificial intelligence models created and studied a representative sample of 12,000 songs, which included a more balanced mix of release years and genres.

Overall, the analysis revealed that songs now use more rhyming words and choruses. “Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Eva Zangerle , the study’s senior author and a computer science professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, tells the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Songs have also become more personal, with pronouns such as “mine” and “me” increasing in frequency across nearly all genres, except for country. They are growing more emotional, too—all genres increased the use of words tied to negative emotions, with rap showing the biggest rise in anger.

Alongside the general trends, different genres told their own stories. “Among the evaluated musical genres, rap is the one in which lyrics play the most prominent role,” the researchers write. Listeners viewed rap lyrics online most often, but the “richness” of the genre’s vocabulary—described as the number of unique words used—was seen to decrease with time. Researchers attributed this trend to rap songs’ tendency to repeat lines and rhymes.

Country music fans were more likely to search and view the lyrics of newer songs, and conversely, rock listeners were more likely to view the lyrics of older songs—a reflection, the researchers posit, of the ages of the genres’ audiences.

Listeners of R&B, a category that also included soul music, viewed lyrics the second most often, reports Forbes ’ Arianna Johnson. But for pop, rock and country, “lyrics might not be a very meaningful indicator” of how the genres have evolved over the last five decades, the authors write.

With more music than ever being listened to on apps and streaming platforms, capturing listeners’ attention has moved to the forefront of many artists’ consideration—and the trends revealed in the new study may reflect that.

“When people are faced with lots and lots of choices, they tend to prefer things that are easier to process and more straightforward,” Michael Varnum , a cultural psychologist at Arizona State University who did not participate in the research, tells Scientific American ’s Lauren Leffer.

Analysis from Paul Lamere of Echo Nest, a music data platform owned by Spotify, shows that almost 50 percent of Spotify listeners will skip a song before it ends, and nearly one-quarter will skip it in the first five seconds.

“The first 10 to 15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle tells AFP. So maybe, in the race to grab listeners’ interest, more repetitive songs have an edge. “Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorize.”

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Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue , Sierra  magazine, Discover  magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal .

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A professor worried no one would read an algae study. So she had it put to music

Dead fish washed ashore in a red tide in 2018 in Sanibel, Fla. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

Dead fish washed ashore in a red tide in 2018 in Sanibel, Fla.

An anthropology professor at the University of South Florida recently published a paper she knew barely anyone would read. At least, not outside her field.

The paper, co-authored with three other professors, had to do with the impact of algae blooms and depletion of coral reefs on the region's tourism industry. The work was glum, says Heather O'Leary . It involved tracking visitors' reactions to the environment on social media.

"Part of the data for months was just reading tweets: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish," she recalls. "We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, especially in St. Pete as a peninsula, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy."

The Picture Show

Changing the climate of protest with aerial art.

But attending concerts at USF's School of Music inspired and gladdened her. So she reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen .

"I'm studying climate change and what's going down at the coral reefs," he remembers her saying. "And I've got all this data and I'd like to know if there's any way that we can turn it into music."

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O'Leary says, in ways it simply does not on a spreadsheet.

Matthew McCutchen, Heather O'Leary and Hunter Pomeroy at the University of South Florida Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble show at USF Concert Hall. Aiden Michael McKahan/University of South Florida hide caption

Matthew McCutchen, Heather O'Leary and Hunter Pomeroy at the University of South Florida Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble show at USF Concert Hall.

"My students were really excited to start thinking about how the other students, the music students, heard patterns that we did not see in some of the repetitions," she says. With music, she added, "you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they're important."

In this case, she says, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities. The complex challenge is a symptom of other, bigger problems. "The world is going to see more and more of these purportedly 'wicked problems,' the ones that take multiple people with different types of training and background to solve," O'Leary says.

Joe's Big Idea

Climate scientist tries arts to stir hearts regarding earth's fate.

The University of South Florida is excited about this composition . Other departments are getting involved, including communications, education and library science. Now, a group of faculty and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented reality experience based on this composition. The group, which calls itself CRESCENDO (Communicating Research Expansively through Sonification and Community-Engaged Neuroaesthetic Data-literacy Opportunities) wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy and democratizing science.

Edited for radio and the web by Rose Friedman. Produced for the web by Beth Novey. Produced for the radio by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.

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March 28, 2024

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Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive since 1980, study finds

by Nature Publishing Group

The lyrics of English-language songs have become simpler and more repetitive over the past 40 years, according to a study published in Scientific Reports .

Eva Zangerle and colleagues analyzed the lyrics of 12,000 English-language rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock songs (2,400 songs per genre ) released between 1980 and 2020.

The authors found that, in general, lyrics have become simpler and easier to understand over time and that the number of different words used within songs has decreased, particularly among rap and rock songs. However, they also found that the number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs since 1980. They suggest that while the use of longer words has increased in rap songs, general increases in the repetitiveness of lyrics across multiple genres have led to lyrics becoming simpler overall.

The authors speculate that the trend towards simpler lyrics could reflect changes in music consumption, such as increases in songs being played as background music .

The authors found that lyrics have tended to become more emotional and personal over time. Use of emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs, while the use of emotionally negative lyrics increased for R&B, pop and country songs. Additionally, all genres showed an increase in the use of anger-related words.

Additional analyses into the views of the 12,000 song lyrics on the online song lyric platform Genius revealed that the lyrics of older rock songs tend to be viewed more than those of newer rock songs but that the lyrics of newer country songs tend to be viewed more than those of older country songs. This could indicate that rock listeners prefer lyrics from older songs, while country listeners may prefer lyrics from newer songs.

The findings provide further insight into the evolution of music over the past 40 years.

Journal information: Scientific Reports

Provided by Nature Publishing Group

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Study says song lyrics are becoming simpler and more repetitive

Congratulations, grumps of the world! Turns out you’re right: According to a just-published study, modern music is simpler and more repetitive than it used to be.

It’s also getting increasingly angry and self-obsessed, if that bothered you as well.

The new study , a collaboration between computer scientists and music experts, analyzed data collected from Last.fm, a music-focused social media site, and Genius, an online compendium of song lyrics. The researchers pulled out the general themes of popular music’s lyrical and musical content.

Their method also examined the complexity of the  lyrics , assessing the diversity of vocabulary and structural characteristics.

The result: over time,  pop music  has become thematically darker and more simplistic.

“There’s more rhyming lines and also more chorus,” Eva Zangerle, the study’s senior author and a computer scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria,  told Scientific American . “We basically found that lyrics [have gotten] easier to understand.”

But before you get too smug, you should know that the study’s sample was wide. It looked at more than 350,000 songs and crossed several popular music genres, from country to rap and hip-hop. The music was released between 1970 and 2020.

This isn’t a recent development. Those golden “oldies” aren’t necessarily exempt.

SEE MORE: Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, more sign letter calling for AI defenses

Some more key details to consider: All of the song data was from English-language music. The study takes care to mention that most users of Last.fm are concentrated in the United States, Europe, Russia and Brazil. It isn’t a complete picture of worldwide musical content; it skews to Western-influenced content.

Also, less complicated wording doesn’t mean other elements of modern songs — such as texture and rhythm — are also becoming simpler. Researchers and critics also say that there are additional aspects at play, including the evolution of certain genres, trends in the recording industry, and the sheer amount of music that is available today. When people find it difficult to process all the choices they have, they go for more easily digestible options.

As one professor noted to Scientific American, simplicity isn’t always a bad thing.

“Complex music isn’t necessarily better music,” said Wellesley College ethnomusicologist Kaleb Goldschmitt, who wasn’t involved with the study. “If that were the case, we’d all be listening to prog rock.”

After all,  Zangerle told The Guardian,  music is a “mirror of society.” Sometimes a catchy, anthemic tune with emotional lyrics is just what we all need.

This story was originally published by Kathleen St. John at  Simplemost.

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Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study

Researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across several genres from 1980 to 2020

You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.

A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.

Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan – who rose to fame in the 1960s – has won a Nobel prize in literature.

Senior study author Eva Zangerle, an expert on recommendation systems at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, declined to single out an individual newer artist for having simple lyrics.

But she emphasised that lyrics can be a “mirror of society” which reflect how a culture’s values, emotions and preoccupations change over time.

“What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said – adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added.

The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.

Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.

Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre’s heyday, rather than its present.

Another way that music has changed is that “the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle said.

Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.

Put simply, songs with more choruses that repeat basic lyrics appear to be more popular.

“Lyrics should stick easier nowadays, simply because they are easier to memorise,” Zangerle said.

“This is also something that I experience when I listen to the radio.”

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Mitski Is a Mesmerizing Study in Movement, and in Pedal-Steel Pop, at L.A.’s Shrine: Concert Review

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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Mitski is such a cerebral record-maker that I didn’t expect to be coming away from her 2024 shows making proclamations that I might have just seen the best- choreographed tour of the year. But it’s true: Her run of three shows at L.A.’s Shine Auditorium was the kind of unexpected, advanced study in movement that couldn’t possibly be guessed just from listening to her records — the latest and best of which was last year’s pretty heady “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.”

Not that the 2024 Mitski setlist wouldn’t still come off just fine if she presented it in a more or less still-life format. This latest album is a departure for her, with music that feels big and orchestrated, a little bit classic-country, and fairly reverb-y, in what adds up to slightly spooky beauty. The songs sounds like they were meant to be played at the “Twin Peaks” roadhouse bar or, barring that un-reality, then in a really huge room, where the sound can bounce around a little and you aren’t quite close enough to crack the code of her stony facial expressions. The Shrine (where years ago she’d played the side Expo Hall, before moving up to the big room) felt like a perfect place to hear something this quietly magisterial and kind of old-school.

That rapt attention and appreciation didn’t seem at all mitigated, or Mitski-gated (sorry), by the fact that the singer sometimes delivered the oldies a little bit differently than they might have been expecting. That is to say, some of the material longtime fans are most familiar with was rearranged to skew closer to the style, or styles, of “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We.” Its genre could be described as modern Americana meets the ghost signal of a clear-channel megawatt station from the 1950s or ’60s. When I first heard the album, my thought was that I was so happy she’d ditched the producer of her previous album, 2022’s synth-poppy “Laurel Hell,” for some new genius; the punchline, of course, is that it’s the same guy, Patrick Hyland, as it almost always is. The two of them seem inhospitable to stasis, so they’ll probably switch it up again for the next album. But while they’re touring behind this one — with Hyland as her musical director as well as guitarist, naturally — they’re letting things cohere a little while they’re in this rich vein, while not being completely resisting having some of the “hits” be as indie or synthy as they always were in her catalog. It’s an ideal balance all around.

The extent to which they’re having fun with some of the rearrangements is best found in Mitski’s new take on “I Don’t Smoke,” a 10-year-old chestnut. If you look at some setlists, fans have marked it down as “I Don’t Smoke (Folk Version).” Well, no. It’s more like “I Don’t Smoke (Hoedown Version)” — far more determinedly country than anything on her latest album (or on Beyonce’s). That’s a big outlier in the set, but a welcome one. Plenty of other moments rely on Mitski’s Patsy Cline inclinations to a far subtler degree, although the amount of pedal steel, fiddle and accordion played by Nashville alt-country veteran Fats Kaplan, the ace in her seven-piece band, is telltale about where this round of influences lies. And if you don’t like the countrypolitan touches? No problem — there’s still a lot of familiarity in this set for any returning fans, whether she’s getting synthy early on with “Working for the Knife” or reviving her more twee rocker mode to close out the encore with “Washing Machine Heart.”

For the rest of the night, once the curtain is gone, the singer stays on a round, slightly elevated platform at center stage, where her props consist of… two wooden chairs, fitfully employed when she needs something to lie down and lean against, or stand atop like she might be jumping off a building. The second number, “Buffalo Replaced,” had her going through the robotic motions of alternately hiding her eyes with both hands and putting them out as a stop signal, something she maintained even during a long, awkward pause between songs and into the beginning of the next one, “Working for the Knife.” Suddenly, in that one, she dropped the peekaboo routine and was all about graceful fluidity, or the occasional go-go-girl pose. At one point she turned her back to the audience and let her hands, wrists and arms form wavelike motions, kind of like the dancer in Bob Fosse’s “The Aloof” number in “Sweet Charity.”

Much later, and much less gracefully, Mitski was down on all fours for, appropriately, the crowd favorite “I Bet on Losing Dogs.” When a performance can make you think of David Byrne, Roy Orbison, Bob Fosse and dog-man Iggy Pop, it’s obviously doing something right.

And this is before getting to the two most interestingly staged moments in the show. In her Billboard Hot 100 hit “My Love Mine All Mine” and on through to “Last Words of a Shooting Star,” shards of something — faux plexiglass? — descended on strings from the top of the stage on down to her platform, then dangled there for a while before finally ascending, one by one, as her touch commanded them to arise. Were we to take these jagged edges as a form of danger that could be commandeered only by the awesome psychic powers of Mitski… or beauty in brokenness… or just nifty-looking stagecraft in a show that otherwise dispenses with it? Probably 6,000 different 15-to-25-agers at the Shrine held 6,000 different interpretations, and the scattered old folks, too, but we were all taken with it.

But “Heaven” offered the sweetest moment, when Mitski danced, arm in arm (sort of), with the white beam of an overhead followspot. That’s probably not as easily choreographed as it looks. (What was it they said about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels? Mitski did everything the spotlight did, but backwards and comprised of physical matter.)

And she did. No, it assuredly wasn’t a concert designed to wrap up her adoring hordes in warm fuzzies. But as a highly theatrical show that still maintained the sense of a real, cool, warm person animating all that minimalist artifice, it ironically felt kind of… could this be the right word?… hospitable.

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Effects of the Educational Use of Music on 3- to 12-Year-Old Children’s Emotional Development: A Systematic Review

José salvador blasco-magraner.

1 Department of Teaching of Musical, Visual and Corporal Expression, Faculty of Teacher Training, Universitat de València, 46010 Valencia, Spain; [email protected] (J.S.B.-M.); [email protected] (P.M.-L.)

Gloria Bernabe-Valero

2 Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Católica de Valencia “San Vicente Mártir”, 46001 Valencia, Spain; [email protected]

Pablo Marín-Liébana

Carmen moret-tatay.

Interest in the study of emotions in education has grown in recent years. Some of our modern challenges, such as constantly adapting to new scenarios or the need for team work have justified the introduction of emotional competence into educational systems, while diverse studies confirm the relationship between music and emotional intelligence, so that the former could be used as a tool to develop the latter. The aim of this work was to examine the evidence for positive effects of music on the emotions of 3- to 12-year-old children, to which end a systematic review was carried out. Two reviewers independently evaluated 424 studies that were identified in MEDLINE, Psycinfo, and CINAHL databases, in order to determine whether they met the stated inclusion criteria. A total of 26 articles were selected for review. The results suggest several beneficial effects of music on children’s development, such as greater emotional intelligence, academic performance, and prosocial skills. It can therefore be concluded that music should be used in school settings, not only as an important subject in itself, but also as an educational tool within other subjects.

1. Introduction

The study of emotions is a subject that has raised researchers’ interest, being extended to fields ranging from philosophy, education, or psychology to health sciences. Regarding the field of education, a century ago John Dewey pointed out the importance of the social and emotional nature of the classroom and the relationship between social processes and learning [ 1 ]. However, the increase in the study of emotions in the area of education during the last two decades has given rise to a more humanistic, holistic, and socio-emotional approach to educational activity [ 2 ]. Salovey & Mayer [ 3 ] were the first to define emotional intelligence as “the ability to monitor one’s own or others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information and to guide one’s thinking and actions”. Since then, a large number of programs have emerged aiming to help educators prevent problem behaviours and to promote children’s health and character development [ 4 ]. In 1994, the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was created, an organisation whose aim was to promote and implement social and emotional learning as an integral part of teaching in schools. [ 5 ].

UNESCO´s well-known Report of the International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, entitled Learning: The Treasure Within [ 6 ], established four pillars on which the new education of the 21st century was based: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. The last two are closely related to emotional intelligence. Since then, research on the importance of emotional education in the field of education has not stopped growing in different scientific disciplines, especially in Psychology, Neurosciences and Behavioral Sciences [ 7 ]. Thus, for example, in the field of psychology there is a wide variety of works that address the study of emotions in the educational context from different topics, such as the importance of emotional competence in the classroom [ 8 , 9 ]; emotions and emotional regulation in the classroom [ 10 , 11 ]; or the importance of goals in the emotional experience of academic failure [ 12 ]. The field of neuroscience has produced numerous studies on the development of emotional regulation and the possible implications for education [ 13 ]; as well as the implications of affective and social neuroscience for educational theory [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Lastly, in the Behavioral Sciences, one can find studies as diverse as the essential characteristics of educational programs for students with emotional and behavioral disorders [ 17 ] or the professional preparation for teachers to effectively implement evidence-based practices for students with Emotional Disabilities [ 18 ].

The reasons for the significant increase in research on the relevance of emotional education in the specific educational contexts have been, in part, the fast and relentless global technological and economic and social changes which have created previously unimaginable pressures and challenges on the younger population, especially on children [ 19 ]. Moreover, the new challenges posed by today’s society demand future professionals who are able to learn constantly by working in a team [ 20 ], which is a challenge in interpersonal emotional management. It is therefore necessary to have eminently social individuals with a high capacity to adapt to the constant changes that today’s society demands [ 21 ]. For this reason, the educational systems of the most developed countries include in their educational programs the development of individual’s emotional competencies [ 22 ]. Social and emotional education is defined as “the educational process by which an individual develops intrapersonal and interpersonal competence and resilience skills in social, emotional and academic domains through curricular, embedded, relational and contextual approaches” [ 1 ] and all children should develop it in order to achieve full and integral personal formation.

What role does music education play in emotional development? In recent years, music education has gained special relevance as part of the curricula of compulsory education in most Western countries [ 23 ], both for its learning benefits in itself [ 24 , 25 , 26 ], as well as for its ability to promote the learning of other disciplines [ 27 , 28 ]. Music has a remarkable capacity to express, transmit, and evoke various emotions and affections in human beings [ 29 , 30 ], regardless of their nationality or culture [ 31 ].

In the last two decades the research on music and its ability to generate emotions in humans has been systematized [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 ]. Numerous studies affirm the ability of music to trigger physiological responses, such as changes in the heart rate, skin temperature, and conductance, respiration and hormone secretion [ 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 ]. Other studies claim that music aids emotional regulation [ 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ] and some have shown that music stimulates the cognitive aspect [ 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 ]. Ultimately, music is described as multidimensional and researchers have categorised it by its arousal properties, emotional quality, and structural characteristics [ 52 ].

The link between music and emotion has contributed to the value of music as a discipline that can be implemented in formal education to develop students’ emotional competence [ 2 , 53 ]. One of the advantages of musical activities is that they mostly require collective participation, which requires cooperation and coordination on the part of the members of a society [ 54 ], making them useful tools for the advancement of socioemotional development. In addition, the social interactions required for music-making offer many opportunities for students to develop their abilities to evaluate their own feelings and at the same time try to relate constructively to the feelings of others [ 55 ]. According to Pellitteri [ 56 ] there are five ways in which music education and social-emotional learning are complementary: music can be used as an emotional stimulus; it can be an aesthetic experience; it can be used for relaxation and imagery; music-making is a form of self-expression; and music-making can be a form of group experience [ 57 ].

Music education thus has a strong impact on children and young people´s intellectual, social, and personal development and therefore on pupils´ psychological well-being [ 58 , 59 ]. To our knowledge, no systematic review has been carried out on how the educational use of music affects the emotional development of children between 3 and 12 years of age. In order to answer this question, a systematic review was carried out to obtain as many studies as possible that explore this developmental stage. The information obtained from all of the studies on this specific subject was thus synthesized and partial or biased conclusions were avoided by referring to the available documents or the authors’ subjective inclusion criteria.

2. Materials and Methods

To find out the effects of the educational use of music on 1–3-year-old children’s emotional development, a systematic review was carried out following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement guidelines. The question under study was: How does the use of music in the educational field affect the emotional development of children aged between 3 and 12 years old?

The articles were selected in different stages by two independent reviewers, who independently extracted data from articles that had been deemed eligible in the selection stage. Discrepancies at further stages were resolved by consensus with a third researcher, so that the process can be described in two main stages. First, the researchers read the titles and abstracts individually, and secondly, the full text to finally compare agreement. The inclusion and exclusion criteria were the same in both stages. In the case of a disagreement, a third reviewer was consulted. The articles rejected in the first or second stage for not meeting the inclusion criteria had the reason for their exclusion described in the results section. Data extraction was based on the recommendations of the “Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews”, including the following information: (i) general information about the study (e.g., author’s citation, and country of origin); (ii) methodology (e.g., duration/follow-up of the study and design and type of music intervention); (iii) information related to the sample (e.g., selection method, sample size, age and sex distribution); (iv) information related to the outcome (e.g., effects in the emotion variable); and (v) additional information (e.g., statistical methods involved or size effects).

Studies were identified in the MEDLINE, Psycinfo, and CINAHL Web of Science and EBSCO databases through EBSCO and WOS (ISI Web of Knowledge) to determine whether they met the stated inclusion criteria. General search terms with the controlled descriptors for each database were used, employing the Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) from MEDLINE terms, and the descriptors and terms published in the literature. As this is a relatively recent field of study there is not yet a general consensus on the definitions of several analysis variables and categories on the relations between music and emotional development, we opted to use generic key words, which opened up a large number of papers. The two main words were music and school , with the addition of school to reduce the search to the educational field.

To connect these terms, we used the Boolean terms “AND” and “OR” to expand and restrict the search spectrum. In addition, a manual search was also performed. The total electronic search of all databases was performed between August and December 2020. The final syntax is defined as follows: “Music” AND “Emotion” AND “School”. In this way, we tried to restrict the sample to studies that focused on the relationship between music and emotions in educational contexts.

2.1. Inclusion Criteria

To be included in the review, articles had to meet the following requirements: (i) the sample of a study had to be children between 3 and 12 years of age, i.e., who were in pre-primary or primary school, to adjust the research question to the selected age range; (ii) it had to be an empirical study (i.e., cross-sectional, cohort, or case-control studies) to guarantee any conclusions drawn from our observations of reality; (iii) it had to measure the role of music in emotion so as to draw conclusions on the effect of music in primary education on the children’s emotional development; and (iv) it must have been published since 2000, in order to analyze studies from the last 20 years, when this new field of knowledge was developed.

2.2. Exclusion Criteria

Articles that met one of the following exclusion criteria were not added to the analyzed sample: (i) those not expressly measuring emotions, dealing with the subject matter in an indirect or secondary way, i.e., those that did not directly deal with the relation between music and emotional development in spite of containing the key words; (ii) those that were non-empirical theoretical or bibliographical studies; (iii) those that were single case studies, due to the difficulty of generalizing any results obtained; (iii) those that included sample ages outside the selected range, i.e., studies on children less than 3 years old, adolescents and adults; and (iv) those that were grey literature or non-peer reviewed journal articles, to guarantee the quality of the reviewed papers.

The results obtained in the systematic review are presented below. After a selective process using the PRISMA protocol flowchart as a reference [ 60 ], the results of the systematic review are depicted in Figure 1 . The sample analyzed reached a total of 26 scientific articles. The number of articles excluded according to the different criteria is shown in Table 1 and a summary of the content developed from the analyzed articles can be consulted in Table 2 . Below is a description of the sample used and a narrative summary of the different papers, grouped according to subject matter.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) flowchart to show study selection process [ 60 ].

Table showing reasons items were excluded.

Summary of findings.

3.1. Sample Description

Evolution of publications.

Distribution of identified topics.

3.2. Combined Results

After analyzing the selected studies the results were organised into two lines: (1) dependent variables, a description of the socio-emotional effects/benefits of music; and (2) independent variables, different types of musical experience and their different effects. It should be noted that many authors did not make this distinction, while other co-relational studies did not follow a specific direction in the associations found. However, we attempted to structure these by assigning dependent and independent variables according to the interpretation of the aim of the studies.

3.3. Organization of the Information on Dependent Variables: What Emotional Effects Are Provided by Music?

This section was structured on the groups included in Table 3 , in which the results are given according to: emotional intelligence, and the educational, training and socio-emotional benefits.

3.3.1. Emotional Intelligence

After analyzing the selected articles we found 11 papers divided into two sub-topics: (1) emotional perception, appraisal, and expression, (2) and emotional regulation.

Perception, Assessment and Expression

Six studies addressed the role of music in relation to emotional perception and assessment. For example, Nieminen [ 65 ] observed that students in the first two years of primary school have the ability to identify greater happiness in pieces composed in the major mode than in the minor mode. This relationship was stronger in those with musical training, especially among the younger ones. In a similar vein, Schellenberg and Mankarious [ 68 ] measured perceptual differences between a group of students with and without musical training, finding that the former scored higher in identifying emotions in images and/or texts. However, the authors point out that this relationship appears to be mediated by IQ, which may be biased both in terms of participating in formal music education activities and identifying emotions on the basis of a measurement instrument based on visual and linguistic processes.

In relation to specific interventions, Kim and Kim [ 73 ] found that the use of a music education program based on group instrumental performance improved students’ ability to recognise emotions. Katagiri [ 79 ] found in a study conducted with a group of children with autism spectrum disorder that teaching them to recognise emotion is more effective with music than when only verbal instructions are used. In addition, it was found that the use of background music associated with the emotions being worked on obtained better results than nursery rhymes, especially for the emotion of anger, as opposed to happiness, sadness, and fear. Of these above four studies it was deduced that musical entertainment and/or music education can help to recognise emotions in pieces of music, texts, and images, unlike other types of non-musical activities, and that this result can also be applied to specific populations such as children with autism spectrum disorder.

However, another study did not find any effect of music training on Emotional Comprehension in children who began the program with high levels of social skills [ 74 ], although it did provide a significant improvement in the children who had poor social skills at the beginning of the study. Along the same lines, Habibi et al. [ 64 ] compared the differences between children who participated in after-school activities in music, sports, or who had not enrolled in any specific activity. The study found no significant differences between the three groups in recognising emotional states by viewing pictures of eyes and empathising with the emotions of others, supporting the idea that the differences found in other studies are due to musical experiences.

However, the results in which no difference was found between the musically trained group and the other two groups could have been due to the short training time (5 days per week for two/three weeks). As the authors themselves propose, the differences associated with musical training were found in another longitudinal study with a 14-month training period with 5–7 year old children [ 88 ]. However, Habibi et al. [ 64 ] considered that their results also give some indirect support for the idea that the kinds of social and emotional skills reported in children who have studied music may be a by-product of music training and designed their study controlling the base line of previous skills in all of the groups, which provided a good base for a complete longitudinal study for the subsequent identification of whether the development of different skills in musical and non-musical adults is specifically due to musical training or to previous skills.

Three papers that deal with emotional expression agree that music can favor emotional expression. For example, Boone and Cunningham [ 62 ] found that, between the ages of 4 and 5 years, children are able to physically express some emotions that they perceive through music, such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear (especially the first two). A study conducted with students from low socio-economic backgrounds concluded that using an Orff-based approach improved their ability to express emotions [ 78 ]. Improvement was also observed in a study in which a music therapy program was implemented [ 61 ].

Emotional Regulation

Two of the articles analyzed dealt with emotional regulation in relation to educational programs including music therapy and concluded that they favored emotional regulation. On the one hand, Brown and Sax [ 63 ] compared the emotional state and regulatory capacity of a group of students after attending a traditional education program or a program with a greater emphasis on arts education, including music education. It was found that individuals who participated in the latter showed a greater capacity to regulate emotions, both positive and negative. Moore and Hanson-Abromeit [ 61 ] observed that a music therapy program improved a range of behaviors associated with emotional regulation such as aggression, attention and both internal and external attitudes.

3.3.2. Educational and Training Benefits

Eleven of the articles analyzed studied the effect of the use of music on the performance of school tasks. For example, Tricard et al. [ 77 ] found that video clips and background music to induce joy and sadness caused students who experienced a positive mood to score higher on deductive reasoning activities. Teske et al. [ 75 ] also found that students’ creativity was enhanced. On the other hand, Venegas et al. [ 76 ] found that the use of an interdisciplinary application that used music to support the learning of graphical representation in mathematics generated positive emotional levels in students. Similarly, another study found that greater use of music education increased motivation levels among students [ 63 ]. Rauduvaite [ 70 ] found that the introduction of urban popular music into the classroom can promote meaningful values in education, partly due to the emotional bond that students have with this type of repertoire.

However, music does not always have only beneficial effects. Su et al. [ 86 ] concluded that listening to background music while reading reduces students´ anxiety and improves some aspects of their reading comprehension, such as extracting explicit information and making direct inferences. However, other aspects with a higher level of interpretation, such as the integration of ideas or the evaluation of content, language, and textual elements, scored lower. Similarly, Rauduvaite [ 70 ] found that the introduction of urban popular music into the classroom can promote meaningful values in education, partly due to the emotional bond that students have with this type of repertoire. Soulier et al. [ 72 ] investigated the relationship between a music-induced mood and performance on spelling tasks, concluding that inducing negative emotions through sad music resulted in poorer performance.

Other studies propose indirect methods to promote an emotional state that can improve the performance of school tasks. In the context of a remedial class, Pimenta and Trevisan [ 69 ] concluded that the introduction of music, especially choral singing, led to an improvement in the feelings experienced when attending these sessions and a new way of relating to the class, as well as a greater interest and involvement in the class. In a similar way, Ramdane et al. [ 66 ] studied the beliefs of a group of Islamic education teachers about the effect of using singing in their classes, and found that the vast majority believed that singing gave them greater emotional awareness and motivation, which could lead to better learning. Similarly, another study found that the use of music with a strong religious-emotional component led students to improve their concentration and creativity [ 82 ].

Improving emotional skills can improve the results of music practice. A research study addressed the relationship between emotional skills and instrumental piano practice [ 80 ], obtained several results. Firstly, they found that identifying emotions helped students to integrate emotional expression into their piano playing and to play more fluently. Secondly, the type of activities most effective in addressing emotional competence were improvisation and associating the pieces with personal experiences. Thirdly, emotional control allowed for greater organisation of the study, minimising moments of impatience, of playing fast and skipping steps, of not being aware of the music, and of not facing difficulties. Finally, bearing in mind that a public performance is conditioned by concerns about others’ judgements, as well as one’s own level of self-esteem, it was claimed that the variable under study could be enhanced by sharing feelings, collaborating, and helping peers, or achieving a goal through effort.

To sum up, the diverse papers analyzed provide empirical evidence of the effect of music in different areas of education, including the negative effects to be avoided (such as its interference with reading tasks that require a high degree of interpretation) and the positive ones that need reinforcement (e.g., a positive mood to promote learning).

3.3.3. Socio-Emotional Benefits

Nine studies found that the use of music enhanced some socio-emotional benefits in diverse areas such as social skills, empathy, and reducing emotional problems. For example, Schellenberg et al. [ 74 ] found that students with a musical background scored higher in sympathy and prosocial skills, although only those with lower levels of musical performance. Another study concluded that singing music with a strong emotional component led students to improve in attitude and social skills such as teamwork [ 82 ]. Similarly, an intervention based on music education resulted in students developing pro-social emotions in relation to their peers with autism spectrum disorder, especially in cases where the latter were bullied [ 81 ]. Kawakami and Katahira [ 71 ] studied the relationship between empathic traits and liking sad music, concluding that those individuals with a higher level of concern for the negative experiences of others, greater capacity to adopt the perspective of the other, and greater development of fantastic imagination, experienced more positive emotions when listening to sad music. Porta [ 81 ] showed that film music makes sense of the audiovisual narrative and helps to hold children’s interest even when they lose the visual part.

Regarding the approach to music education, Jeremić et al. [ 67 ] measured differences in the social-emotional competencies of children who were taught singing by a specialist teacher who used an active methodology in which she performed the songs, or by a non-specialist teacher who played the recordings on audio devices. Significant improvements in social-emotional competencies were found in the experimental group that had used an active method. For example, they were more empathetic towards those who had difficulty with intonation and felt more positive about singing individually. These results suggest that not all of the ways of using music obtain the same effects.

Other studies found a decrease in negative social-emotional attitudes when participating in certain intervention programs that included music. Thus, Ho et al. [ 83 ] studied the effect of an experience combining participation in a drumming group with educational counselling on students with low socio-economic backgrounds. The group made significant improvements in behaviors such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, inattention, and some defiant attitudes. In the same direction, Kang [ 71 ] investigated the effect of a therapy based on the use of music (singing, listening, and performing) and sand play in children who had witnessed domestic violence. The author observed that individuals showed improvements related to emotional behavioral problems such as depression, anxiety, aggression, oppositional behavior, and post-traumatic stress. Finally, it was observed that the use of a music education program based on group instrumental performance reduced physical and verbal aggression [ 73 ].

Although there have not been a great number of studies performed that show the socio-emotional benefits, they all provide diverse methods for using music to improve these skills.

3.4. Organizing Information by the Independent Variables: What Types of Musical Experience Have What Types of Socio-Emotional Effects?

Ten studies used listening to music as the independent variable to compare its effects in different emotional areas and in general found them to be beneficial. Nieminen et al. [ 65 ] showed that children better identified their emotions according to major or minor chords. Su et al. [ 86 ] concluded that background music improved students’ moods, and thus indirectly other skills such as reading comprtehension. Porta [ 84 ] found sound held children’s interest even in the absence of images and that music had a significance for children in aspects related to emotions. Tricard et al. [ 77 ] found that videoclips and background music promote positive emotions in children and a significant improvement in deductive reasoning. Teske et al. [ 75 ] found that happy music promotes a positive mood and creativity. Katagiri [ 79 ] found that background music increases emotional comprehension in autistic children. Rauduvaite [ 70 ] found that popular music helped children’s education due to their emotional tie with this repertory. Finally, Boone & Cunningham [ 62 ] found that children could represent the emotional significance of music by expressive movements, especially the sad and happy moments. One of the controversial aspects was the effect of sad music on children: while Kawakami & Katahira [ 85 ] found that empathic children enjoy sad music, Soulier [ 72 ] found that inducing negative emotions through sad music reduced their concentration on spelling tasks.

Fourteen studies used musical training as the independent variable and obtained evidence that it improved diverse socio-emotional competencies, including: identifying emotions in images and/or texts [ 68 ]; a greater capacity to regulate emotions [ 63 ]; concentration and creativity [ 82 ]; students’ ability to recognise emotions [ 73 ]; improved learning and mathematics [ 76 ]; a positive effect on children’s self-expression, self-efficacy, and social skills [ 78 ]; improved the feelings experienced when attending class [ 69 ]; greater emotional awareness and motivation from singing [ 66 ]; increased empathy and positive feelings for learning [ 67 ]; influenced the effects of emotional understanding [ 64 ]; influenced emotional awareness, regulation and autonomy [ 80 ]; increased pro-social behavior in neurotypical children in relation to the social exclusion of autistic children [ 74 ]; promoted the development of pro-social skills [ 81 ]; improved behaviors such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, inattention and some defiant attitudes [ 83 ]; and increased children’s motivation and thus their learning capacity [ 66 ].

Finally, two studies used a musical therapy program as the independent variable and found improved emotional behavioral problems, including depression [ 71 ] and children’s emotional comprehension and emotional regulation [ 61 ].

4. Discussion

This systematic review seeks to understand the role that music plays in the emotional education of children in infant and primary education. The scientific literature indicates, on the one hand, that in all educational processes there is an emotional component that conditions the teaching-learning process [ 1 ]. On the other hand, today’s society demands individuals who are increasingly able to adapt to change [ 21 ], and with the skills to work collaboratively [ 20 ]. This has led to the implementation of various educational programs that seek to introduce the development of emotional competence in the classroom [ 4 , 5 , 22 ]. At the same time, some studies belonging to the fields of Psychology [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ], Neuroscience [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ], and Behavioral Sciences [ 17 , 18 ] have investigated the importance of emotional education in the education system. In addition, the central role of music has been demonstrated in aspects such as emotional expression, emotional induction, and emotional regulation [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ].

Starting from this conceptual framework, this review aims to systematise the knowledge accumulated through the research works of the last two decades with samples made up of individuals from 3 to 12 years of age. The 26 articles analyzed indicate that publications on this topic have experienced a linear growth since 2008, that most of the research is carried out in the context of primary education, and that the topics most frequently dealt with are the development of emotional intelligence [ 87 ], educational and training benefits, and socio-emotional benefits.

With regard to the first aims, two studies have observed that students with musical training have a greater facility for recognising emotions [ 65 , 68 ]. The attribution of this effect to musical experiences is reinforced by a study that found no differences prior to such training [ 64 , 74 ]. Other studies have shown how certain educational interventions using music led to improvements in the emotional recognition of students [ 73 , 79 ]. However, caution should be exercised with these results, as Schellenberg et al. [ 74 ] found no differences between children with and without musical training, whereas Schellenberg and Mankarious [ 68 ] point out that the relationship could be mediated by IQ, which would act as a bias. In this regard, it would be interesting for future research to experiment with measurement instruments that do not depend on the cognitive abilities of the participants.

In relation to the two studies [ 64 , 74 ] that found no differences between the groups with and without musical training in emotional recognition skills, we consider that the results, in spite of being the opposite of those expected, do not invalidate the general statement that music favors emotional perception and assessment. This is because firstly it provides evidence that music is an especially efficient instrument for children who had poor social skills at the beginning of the study, and secondly it emphasises the need to control the participants’ basic levels and carry out longitudinal studies long enough to capture the improvements produced while establishing relationships that specifically assolciate these benefits with musical training.

Similarly, it has been found that the use of proposals that include music improves children’s capacity for emotional expression [ 61 , 78 ], who are able to express perceived emotions through music from the age of 4–5 years old [ 62 ]. Emotional regulation also benefits when methodologies in which music plays a central role are used [ 61 , 63 ]. Therefore, the results obtained suggest that the use of music, whether in the form of specific ongoing training or one-off interventions, improves some aspects of emotional intelligence [ 87 ], especially emotional perception, expression, and regulation.

This is consistent with some studies that argue that music has a remarkable capacity to express, transmit, and evoke diverse emotions and affections in human beings. Thus, for example, Flores-Gutierrez & Diaz [ 29 ] claim that there are musical sequences that stimulate a specific group of emotions and others that evoke a more general response to a type of emotion that has a certain polarity, such as being pleasant and vigorous. Thus, in their study they find music that globally stimulates one of the four major axes defined in their circular affective model, such as pleasant (Mozart), unpleasant (Mussorgski), exciting (Metallica), or relaxing (Japanese music) emotions. For their part, Thompson & Quinto [ 30 ] claim that the power of music to elicit emotion lies in its ability to engage participants in tightly controlled synchronisation at multiple levels of abstraction. Music optimally recruits synchronisation processes that are ubiquitous in human behavior and that greatly influence our emotional lives.

This ability to express, transmit, and evoke diverse emotions and affects is, moreover, independent of the culture to which one belongs. Balkwill & Thompson [ 31 ] demonstrated that naïve listeners from different cultures obtained as high a level of agreement in their emotional responses to music as expert listeners, who were deeply familiar with the culture-specific cues embedded in the music samples.

On the other hand, music helps emotional regulation. In this regard, Randall et al. [ 45 ] conducted research in which they found that using music to regulate a recently experienced emotion achieved the greatest hedonic success. For these authors, personal music listening is used as an independent regulatory resource, allowing listeners to achieve specific emotional goals. Saarikallio & Erkkilä, [ 47 ] conducted a study to recognise music´s role in mood regulation in adolescents. The study showed that listening or performing music has an impressive capacity to promote emotional self-regulation. In this regard, music offered adolescents resources to enhance and restore well-being, making their emotional lives more varied and colorful. In addition, Saarikallio [ 46 ] asserts that the general nature of music-related emotional self-regulation remains relatively similar throughout adulthood.

It therefore seems reasonable to think that the educational use of music may contribute to students’ development of some dimensions of emotional intelligence. However, none of the work addresses the levels of emotional facilitation and understanding reported by Mayer and Salovey [ 87 ] in their model. This could be due to the fact that these are higher level skills with a higher level of complexity and abstraction that are beyond the developmental possibilities of infant and primary school students. Future work should explore the possibilities of developing these levels of emotional competence in school-age children.

In relation to the educational and formative benefits, the results indicate that music can play a role in triggering positive emotional states [ 75 , 76 , 77 ] and higher levels of motivation, concentration, and interest [ 63 , 66 , 69 , 70 , 82 ], which promotes learning in the classroom. It can also reduce the occurrence of negative emotional states such as anxiety and depression [ 86 ]. These benefits have been observed in relation to different school contents, such as improving deductive reasoning [ 77 ], creativity [ 75 ], graphic representation [ 76 ], reading [ 86 ], education in values [ 70 ], orthography [ 72 ], or instrumental practice [ 80 ].

These results are consistent with other research that has found music activities such as instrumental performance or improvisation stimulate cognitive processes [ 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 ], and that they are able to support learning in other disciplines. Johnson & Memmott [ 27 ], in a study of 4739 children, demonstrated the relationship between the quality of music instruction and academic performance on standardised tests in English and mathematics. For these authors, music is a very useful tool to support academic performance. On the other hand, Rickard et al. [ 28 ] conducted a study with 151 schoolchildren on the impact of school music programs on verbal and visual memory processes over a two-year period. The results revealed that schools with high-quality music programs performed better on standardized tests than students in schools with lower-quality music offerings.

Finally, in terms of socio-emotional benefits, the articles reviewed agree that both music training and music education can be beneficial for students’ social and emotional development [ 74 ], such as the fact that the use of music in educational and therapeutic processes [ 81 , 82 ] can have a positive impact on the development of social skills in which some kind of emotion comes into play, such as empathy, teamwork, the development of a pro-social attitude or self-esteem. Similarly, they can contribute to the reduction of negative socio-emotional attitudes such as depression, anxiety, aggression, inattention, defiant and oppositional behavior, or post-traumatic stress [ 71 , 73 , 83 ]. These benefits coincide with some of the challenges posed by today’s society, which requires social subjects with high intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that allow them to work in teams and adapt to change [ 1 , 20 , 21 ].

Specific educational programs that encourage the development of pro-social skills include participation in a drumming group [ 83 ], group musical performance [ 73 ], or training in singing through a specialist teacher who used her voice in the classroom [ 67 ]. These results seem to indicate that the use of music has the capacity to bring social-emotional benefits insofar as it is experiential and fosters personal relationships. This is consistent with some authors who point out that music often involves a series of social interactions that favor socio-emotional learning [ 55 , 56 , 57 ]. Moreover, it coincides with the ethnomusicological perspective that conceives of music as a socio-cultural phenomenon that requires cooperation and coordination [ 54 ]. This perspective would also contribute to broadening the theoretical basis that justifies the use of active methodologies in the classroom as opposed to more traditional models focused on theory, technique, and individual learning [ 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 ]. In further research, it would be useful to study not only the greater or lesser use of music, but also the methodology implemented. In this regard, the comparison between the effects produced by traditional, active, and critical pedagogical models would be a valuable contribution to the field of emotional education, as they could be used to guide teachers in their educational practices and to design both initial and ongoing professional training programs.

Regarding the different musical experiences, it was found that both exposure to music, musical entertainment, and musical therapy programs provide improvements in the emotional sphere.

5. Conclusions

This systematic review found that using music in the education of 3–12 year olds can have a positive effect on their emotional development. We first found that it can contribute to the development of emotional intelligence, especially with regard to emotional perception, expression, and regulation. The students that took part in activities using music were more capable of recognising and expressing their emotions and regulating their emotional states, such as aggression or anger. Secondly we found that music is capable of providing educational, formative, and socio-emotional benefits. In this regard its emotional impact can improve aspects such as deductive reasoning, creativity, graphic representation, reading, spelling, education in values, or practical instrumental skills. It can also boost attitudes such as sympathy, empathy, and other prosocial skills, and reduce anxiety, depression, and defiant attitudes. It is therefore recommended that music be incorporated into the different curricular levels, educational contexts, and areas of knowledge. Likewise, the establishment of educational policies aimed at guaranteeing universal access to musical training is suggested, as well as an increase in the presence and recognition of this discipline in formal educational contexts.

Most of the limitations encountered in this study were due to the considerable heterogeneity in the different studies selected, which made it difficult to integrate them into a single framework. All the studies used different independent variables, such as musical listening, entertainment, or music therapy, and different dependent variables such as different emotional effects or in the development of socio-emotional skills. We therefore had to integrate and synthesize the information into a scheme to make sense of the results. However, our double approach to structuring the results (first by the socio-emotional effects and then by the musical variables) allowed us to better structure them, although it was a difficult and complex task.

We should first of all point out that the studies came from different disciplines such as musical education, music psychology, music teaching, music therapy, etc., and thus different researchers used their own theories, methods, nomenclatures, and instruments, which made it difficult to combine the results in a common language. The second difficulty was the lack of a classification with a wide consensus of positive emotions or emotional skills. Psychology is known to classically study psychopathology and has classified the universally accepted diverse psychological disorders (e.g., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) [ 93 ] and the International Classification of Diseases (CIE10) [ 94 ]). These serve as a guide to researchers who can compare their results using these classifications. However, until the emergence of Positive Psychology in the first decade of the 21st century this discipline had not focused on the positive aspects of human existence, so that there were still no official classifications of the positive emotional sphere that were generally accepted by all researchers

The present work aimed to find positive emotional aspects, and although we used studies from the year 2000 these were not based on a common taxonomy regarding the measurement and classification of these effects. However, we had serious difficulty in integrating the results into a common scheme, although we got some support from Mayer & Salovey’s Theory of Emotional Intelligence [ 87 ], which includes different emotional facets and skills and is widely recognized in scientific fields. Thirdly, we should point out that there are overlaps and covariances among the dependent variables (e.g., if we improve emotional recognition the socio-emotional skills will probably also improve) and in the independent variables (e.g., musical entertainment programs include listening and music therapy). This makes it difficult to ascertain the relations between the variables and alerts us to the need for a more experimental approach in this field that uses common categories to construct more solid knowledge.

Fourthly, we were not able to extract solid syntheses and conclusions from homogenous groups in diverse variables of interest (e.g., specific ages, music styles, different levels of empirical evidence) due to the lack of appropriate studies. We opted for a generic search in order to deal with the wide range of papers. A narrower search would have provided greater precision with more homogeneous results but less information, counting on a small number of papers for the systematic review. We therefore consider that our approach achieved a balance between information and precision, since it allowed us to draw a map of the present situation and integrate this information into a joint scheme.

The wide fragmentation of the papers is an indication of the relatively recent emergence of this field of study, which associates music education with its emotional effects. However, we consider that studies such as this will allow us to detect the obstacles and deficiencies in order to go on constructing the basis of a common language to improve the comparison of the results and the advances in clarifying the empirical evidence in relation to the effects of musical education in the socio-emotional area.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, J.S.B.-M., G.B.-V., and P.M.-L.; methodology, J.S.B.-M., P.M.-L., and C.M.-T.; investigation, J.S.B.-M., G.B.-V. and P.M.-L.; data curation, J.S.B.-M., C.M.-T. and P.M.-L.; writing—original draft preparation, J.S.B.-M., G.B.-V. and P.M.-L.; writing—review and editing, J.S.B.-M.; P.M.-L., and G.B.-V.; supervision, G.B.-V., and C.M.-T. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This work was funded by the Faculty of Psychology of the Catholic University of Valencia San Vicente Mártir under Grant (number 2021-198-001).

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Conflicts of interest.

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