What music did these music students find distracting while reading?

Details

University students widely use background music while studying, but evidence on whether particular genres help or disrupt concentration is mixed, especially among trained musicians. This exploratory pilot study examined how classical and pop music related to reading comprehension and subjective concentration in a deliberately small sample of postgraduate music students.

Four Master in Music Education students at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam were assigned to classical music—Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major (n = 2)—or pop music—Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” (n = 2). In a remote Google Meet session under COVID-19 constraints, each participant read a neutral chemistry-history text for ten minutes while listening to the assigned track, then answered ten comprehension questions without referring back to the text. Scores were reported descriptively: 7/10 and 3/10 for classical, and 5/10 and 8/10 for pop; no inferential statistics were computed, and the small sample precludes generalisation.

The study’s primary contribution was a Braun and Clarke thematic analysis of questionnaire responses and individual online interviews. It identified four themes: distraction from lyrics in a language the listener understood; musical familiarity, structure and climactic features; task type as a moderator of music suitability; and individual preference and study habit. Participants consistently described understandable lyrics, high-frequency or bass-heavy pop arrangements, and analytically engaging classical climaxes as disruptive during dense factual reading, while familiar instrumental tracks or tracks in languages they did not understand were often experienced as less intrusive. The authors framed the study as hypothesis-generating groundwork for larger, controlled investigations, not as evidence of causal genre effects.