Music to Write By

Source: Bruce Mars/Wikimedia Commons

In a study by two researchers at University College London, 10- and 11-year-olds were asked to write an “exciting” story. Some wrote while listening to exciting music—"I Spy, The Looking Glass" (a breakbeat instrumental). Some wrote to calming music—"Gymnopodies" by Erik Satie (slow-moving piano). And some wrote in silence.

Which kids do you think wrote the most exciting pieces? Surprisingly, the ones listening to either calming music or silence (about the same), according to independent judges. And which music did the kids perceive worked best? The exciting music.

The kids in the “exciting” group not only did not write better, however. They had more trouble getting started, were more restless and fidgety, and asked lots of non-task-related questions.[i] They were distracted.

This research, though involving youngsters, reflects decades of research on the impact of listening to music on adult cognitive performance: People doing cognitive tasks while listening to music—adults or children—have a tough time, and they often don’t realize it.

Experiments give mixed, sometimes conflicting results, however.[ii] They also point to different effects among people with different personalities.[iii] If you enjoy listening to music while you write, science offers just a couple of general guidelines.

First, if you’re a diehard write-to-music type, you’ll do best to listen to instrumental music. People who listen to instrumentals often perform cognitive tasks just about as well as if they perform in silence.[iv] Second, if you can’t resist playing an exciting tune, especially one with vocals, listen before you write.

You might have thought that listening to what you like works best to inspire writing with more impact. That’s what the kids thought. But the research shows that three factors should figure into your choice.

1. Choose music to fit your task.

If you’re writing something easy—rehashing familiar ideas, tailoring passages for a fresh audience—you can just as well listen to whatever you like. The reason is that your working memory can handle the processing of both the music and of language production.

Working memory is the constraining factor. If you have some to spare, you won’t hinder your performance. Some experiments even show the music will help you perform better.

Manuel Gonzalez and John Aiello at Baruch College and Rutgers conducted an experiment in which they had people perform simple verbal tasks—finding words in a list with specific letters. The people performed better while listening to music. But the story was the reverse for complex verbal tasks—remembering the second word of a word pair read earlier.[v]

So if you’re expressing new ideas, beware burdening yourself with too much to process. Music can hijack essential capacity you need—or at least slow your output. In a study of college students who were writing original 10-minute essays, researchers found that listening to music cut their output by roughly 60 words an hour.[vi]

2. Choose music to fit your personality.

A number of studies have compared the cognitive performance of music-listening introverts versus extraverts. In studies that tested verbal tasks—tasks like finding synonyms and antonyms—extraverts did just as well while listening to music.[vii]

Not so for the introverts. They performed worse. Researchers theorize that the extraverts preferred and sought external stimulation owing to their lower resting cortical activity, and they had the working memory to accommodate it.

Gonzalez and Aiello at Baruch and Rutgers, who included both introverts and extraverts in their 2019 research, found mixed results, however. The capacity or people to listen and perform cognitively depended on the difficulty of the task.[viii]

So if you’re wondering: Do I have extra leeway to add audio stimuli to the background and perform well? You may if you’re an extravert. But if you’re an introvert, forget it. Future research may confirm these results.

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3. Choose music at the right time.

You have another option as an audiophile. Listen to music before you write. A number of studies examine the effect of music on cognitive tasks performed after listening. Although this research also remains inconclusive, it yields interesting results.

A contingent of researchers speculated for years that music aided cognitive performance—at least performance of certain kinds. In one landmark experiment, researchers showed that people who had just listened to a Mozart sonata performed better on spatial-temporal tasks.[ix]

The results kicked up a media craze, and more than one news story in the 1990s promoted a thesis that overshot the data, dubbing the finding the “Mozart effect.” Small children, guided by their parents, were then led to believe that music had almost magical cognitive-enhancing powers.

Alas, nobody has been able to replicate the Mozart effect.[x] The pop psychology that grew from the Mozart study…popped. Still, a piece of the theory has remained in play. It suggested that music can put people in a right mood to facilitate cognition.[xi] Researchers in recent years can’t find much empirical backing for that either, but an intriguing, related line of research makes one wonder about another effect—on verbal creativity.

Katherine Eskine at Wheaton College led a study in which people were asked to listen to 260-second-long music tracks. The music included hip-hop (“Can’t Hold Us” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis) and classical (Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”).

Afterwards—after the music quit—the Eskine team asked people to perform 38 compound remote associates tasks (so-called CRATs). Each such CRAT challenges people to combine a set of three words given to them (“stick,” “maker,” “point”) with a fourth of their own that goes with the initial three—more or less as prefixes or suffixes.

Solving CRATs, a widespread experimental technique, is believed to be a measure of creativity, and Eskine’s team’s results were clear: Although people who listened to the music did not report changed moods, they did perform much better in solving CRATs.[xii]

The implication? If you’re trying to be creative verbally, play the music beforehand. It can help you to then connect faint—yet fruitful—thoughts across distant and disparate parts of your brain. And such connections can help you to come up with something new—in this case, the word “match.”

Why music would induce creativity remains speculative. But experiments suggest that the music does have a positive effect on mood—as in the calming music for those kids. Yet other research shows this positive mood can spur the emergence of insights. These insights, so the evidence suggests, come from intuitive instead of analytical thinking.[xiii]

Whether you finally decide to write to music, of course, is up to you. But when you choose, the lesson is not to refrain altogether—or to just listen to instrumentals. It is to pick the right time and right music for the right writing job. Let your museful common sense, in other words, be your guide.[xiv]