“Don’t listen to music while studying!” This is a common statement that students have heard from their parents and/or teachers. With adults constantly stating that listening to music while studying is bad, students have never even been skeptical of the reason why music is bad for studying. Has it really been proven to be bad? Certainly, it can “lower your productivity and affect your productive mood”. Yet, according to the Healthline, music can actually “improve mood, motivation, memory, brain stimulation, and management of pain and fatigue”. With different perspectives on listening to music while studying, I decided to interview two of my friends to discover more opinions.  

Mary Kim, a 10th grader at Seoul Foreign School and someone who enjoys music, strongly believes that listening to music has myriad benefits. She said, “Music is my greatest motivation,” since she is the type of person who easily gets distracted by her surroundings. Additionally, she added “With the advancement of technology these days, like the development of the AirPods Pro, music motivates me even more than before.” Particularly, with her noise-cancelling earphones, she can’t even hear her mother calling her for dinner, which perhaps proves that she really is focusing on studying. Yet, Mary did mention that it really depends on which genre of music she listens to. For instance pop songs, such as those by Blackpink and BTS, make her want to hum the lyrics. “Especially for memorizing vocabulary, which is something that I really need to focus on, music is a distraction for me.” Thus, Mary decided to make a playlist specifically for studying, which mostly consists of calm, classical music. 

Similarly, as Mary, Sooa, also a 10th grader in Seoul Foreign School, stated that she does prefer to listen to music than studying in silence. Although she used to watch videos like ‘study with me’ on YouTube instead of listening to music, she figured that watching videos makes her procrastinate more, which is mainly the reason why she switched to listening to music. When asking if she relates to Mary, who said that classical music is better than other genres, she answered “yes, but for me it is least important”. And added, “whether it is classical or pop music, I think it really depends on what I am studying on”. Personally, for her, she feels that music helps her with subjects like math and science, while having a silent surrounding is the best environment for writing an essay for English.

As these two interviews show, music generally has a positive impact on students when studying. Yet, there are various opinions on the conditions under which music should be listened to. These conditions remain unclear, and it is different for every student. Although adults may still argue that listening to music is only harmful for students, they should be aware of the benefits that students experience when listening to music. Thus, the content of this interview breaks the misconceptions that listening to music while studying is either entirely beneficial or wholly disadvantageous. 

Amy Park
Grade 10
Seoul Foreign School