In my experience, humming a tune or listening to some soft music helps with learning. But does any background music help, or only some specific type? Hu et al. address this question here. The authors conducted an experiment with four different types of music (different in the sense of mode and tempo) and one environmental sound (the sound of sea waves and a seagull). The objective was to study their impact on learning, with special emphasis on emotion change, metacognition, and learning performance (especially comprehension).

Both physiological and behavioral data was collected from 33 graduate students. Initial results show that different musical pieces have contrasting effects, “after focused listening and self-perceived engagement with the reading passages,” but not so with respect to learning performance. However, a significant difference was observed on one indicator based on physiological signals during focused listening, but not during text reading, and more differences appeared when the effects of the five different types of music were compared within subgroups of the participants. This indicates that background music has contrasting effects from one individual to another.

The paper is interesting. However, the authors’ view that only instrumental music, and not vocal music, helps with learning is controversial (“As vocal music is deemed distracting in learning tasks, 1000 instrumental pieces ... were randomly selected” p. 102). From my experience working with a medical team on music-medicine (the effects of Hindustani ragas on brain injury), it is not vocal or instrumental music that matters. What matters is whether the music is soothing to the sympathetic nervous system. Generally, soft music or music that is more dominant in melody than rhythm is preferred, and of course played at low volume.