How does music affect the mind’s ability to encode and retrieve information?

The number of students who listen to background music while studying has been increasing rapidly. The effect music has on memory has been studied quite thoroughly for a couple of decades, and yet still the effect it has on long-term memory performance remains ambiguous. Numerous studies have concluded—in contradiction with each other—that music can improve, hinder, or have no effect on memory performance. Despite these ambiguous results on memory, music has been shown to improve and enhance other cognitive functions like concentration and focus.Separating the encoding and retrieval processes of long-term memory can help interpret the past mixed results in this particular research area. To this end, we compared the effects of background music on the encoding and retrieval processes of memory, something previous studies have not investigated. Four groups of college students under varying listening conditions were instructed to memorize a fifteen word list and were then asked to recall that very same list to the best of their ability two days later. We found that music, as opposed to noise, had a negative effect on performance when listened to at both the encoding and retrieval stages. No significance was found during the mixed music and noise conditions during encoding and retrieval. We discuss possible reasons such as individual musical preference, selection of music, working memory performance, and more for these unclear findings.