Sound and Education

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Sound plays an integral part in our lives. It can warn us of impending danger, change our mood, and convey the words of others to us. It is via sound that we learn most things in our lives, from language in our formative years to the passing of knowledge from one person to another throughout the rest of our lives.

Since at least the 1980s, doctors, scientists, and physiologists have debated and discussed the relationship between sound and learning. In a 1980 issue of the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology,  Cohen, Glass, and Singer reported children subjected to the noise of highways and airports had lower test scores than those that weren’t. Doctors Bernard Pasternack and Roy Shore retested that theory and published the results in the 1982 issue of Environmental Health: An International Journal titled, Effects of Aircraft Noise on Reading Ability of School-Age Children. They also showed that students near noisy airports did do worse on test scores than those further away. Psychologist Priscilla J. Hambrick-Dixon narrowed her study to the effects of elevated train noise on African-American preschoolers. Her findings, printed March 1986 in Developmental Psychology Vol 22, showed young children subjected to such noise had less developed psychomotor skills than those further away in quieter neighborhoods.

These studies indicate that noise can be very detrimental to the learning process. But is all sound noise? What of music?

Pop into any college study hall, and you'll see students of all types plugged into a plethora of devices enjoying their favorite music. Music and studying have become a staple on campuses big and small since the 1960s but exploded when Sony released their Walkman device on January 1st, 1979. The music-laden smartphone and laptop computer have long since replaced the blue and silver cassette player, and tunes played are as varied as the subjects studied, but if you were to pluck away the earbuds that replaced bulky headphones and ask, students would insist that their musical selection is a needed aid in the learning process.

Dr. Alfred Tomatis questioned the connection between music and brain development, specifically, IQ and spatial reasoning, in his 1991 book, Pourquoi Mozart (Why Mozart). An otolaryngologist, Tomatis believed hearing and disease are interrelated and described the benefits of listening to music, specifically Mozart, as the "Mozart Effect." Tomatis' "Mozart effect" makes the extraordinary claim the piano concertos of Mozart can generate a temporary boost in IQ and short-term memory.

In 1993, Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw & Catherine Ky with the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California, Irvine evaluated students listening to Mozart prior to taking the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Their work showed an increase of eight to nine points higher, but the benefits faded after 15 minutes. Seven years later, in 2010, Jakob Pietschnig, Martin Voracek, and Anton Formann with the University of Vienna conducted over forty studies with 3,000 subjects and using Mozart sonata for two pianos in D major. They found no evidence of any lasting Mozart Effect on test scores or spatial reasoning. Those results, snarkily named, Mozart effect�"Shmozart effect: A meta-analysis, were published in the May 2010 issue of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences journal, Intelligence, for peer review.

A 2014 study done by Nick Perham and Harriet Currie with the Department of Applied Psychology of Cardiff Metropolitan University also set out to prove if music improves short-term memory. The first of their four test groups studied in silence; the second group subjected to their favorite songs, the third listen to musical selections they disliked, the last group listened to nonverbal music such as Mozart's piano concertos while they studied. Of the four groups, those subjected to silence did 60% better than those listening to music, and those listening to music with no lyrics did better than those with words. The like or dislike of the musical selection did not affect the results.   

Multiple studies in the last two decades focused on Dr. Alfred Tomatis' claim that music improves IQ. The bulk of that work focused on either the relationship between noise and learning or music and test scores. However, how many of those students listening to music while studying would be distracted by other activities, activities more pleasurable that study? Thus generating more study time than those that didn't. This is an unanswered question worthy of investigation.

Yuna Ferguson, assistant professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University Shenango, noted in her article, Trying to Be Happier Really Can Work: Two Experimental Studies, music did improve the happiness of listeners. In a 2011 Nature Neuroscience article  Valorie Salimpoor, Mitchel Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain Dagher & Robert Zatorre noted that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, is released when listening to music.

According to Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, dopamine modulates the brain's ability to perceive rewards. While not addicting, dopamine increases the desire to perform more of the same pleasurable act. Since listening music to studying is pleasurable, the dopamine release instills the desire to study more which could easily translate to higher test scores and higher retention of the material.

These studies and articles are but pinpricks in the relationship between music and learning and are akin to trying to examine all the possible information through the back end of a telescope. The available data supports that noise has a negative impact on learning, while music has no lasting impact either positive or negative.  A more exhaustive and comprehensive study under controlled conditions regarding the long-term effects of listening to music while studying contrasted against students who do not might yield surprising results showing the benefits of the former.