BRADEN HURSCH

A new school year is just beginning — and who would have guessed that an iTunes playlist could be the most important tool for studying success? Listening to music before, during, and after studying can have an extremely beneficial outcome for your academic pursuits.

There are obviously countless ways in which a person prefers to study — whether it is alone and silently, in a busy coffee shop, in the living room with the television on, or with friends in the library. Distractions may either be embraced or avoided at all costs depending on the individual.

Listening to music you enjoy and are familiar with before studying can have a calming effect on the listener as it releases the brain’s natural feel-good chemicals — dopamine and serotonin. According to a Stanford University study, if certain music sparks particular memories or is associated with especially happy situations your brain will attempt to project that feeling. Music has a profound impact on our state of being, altering everything from mood to heart rate. Due to this, it has the power to both energize and depress us.

But what should a person listen to while studying to make the experience more successful — or at the very least, more enjoyable?

The much-disputed “Mozart-Effect” claims that listening to classical music provides short-term enhancement of mental tasks including memorization — but this has yet to be fully verified. So without the science to back it, don’t feel inclined to blast Bach into your headphones unless you were already doing so.

Study music preferences vary from person to person just as drastically as personal musical taste. Do you prefer lyrical or instrumental? Rap or rock? Electronic dance music or ambient noise? Folk or metal? Relaxed or intense? I polled friends from different colleges and the results were all over the musical spectrum.

Students in colleges with heavy reading loads tend to lean towards relaxed, instrumental and ambient music when they are reading and researching as they find it to be less side-tracking than lyric-heavy rap or aggressive gym-going music. Artists such as Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Alt-J, the National, and Iron & Wine are all excellent choices for quiet reading and research as their lyrics are simple and non-distracting. Some instrumental groups that can be used for background noise and noise-cancellation in a bustling area include Explosions in the Sky, Holy Fuck, Caribou, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Students in language studies are especially advised to avoid lyrical music because words affect the same parts of the brain that comprehend language, according to researchers from the University of Phoenix. The human tendency to unconsciously memorize lyrics would be in direct opposition to learning and storing the words of a new language.

Two students from Edwards School of Business — Morgan Arnelien and Dallas Dazzan — prefer hip-hop and R&B when working on their portion of group assignments as they felt that the upbeat music assisted with creativity. Artists such as Frank Ocean, Drake, Kings of Leon and Childish Gambino were considered useful during assignments but were considered distracting while turning textbook pages. It was also mentioned that the time of day has some correlation to which genre is listened to. Relaxed music is great for the daytime, but when its almost midnight in the Murray Library the energy level has to be increased to prevent you from falling asleep.

The most decisive way to find your study style is through trial and error. If your phone is continuously in your hand as you scroll through songs, its probably not helping you study and will most likely lead you to checking Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the same time. If this is the case, either create a playlist that doesn’t require constant supervision or simply bury your phone in your backpack and leave it be.

If you find yourself on the same page of a textbook for 20 minutes having a solo dance-party in a cubicle on the fifth floor of the Murray Library, maybe it’s time to take the headphones out — or switch majors. But if you can get into the zone of perfect studying with your tunes playing, stick with what works.

Find what works for you — whether its the same album on a loop, a YouTube playlist, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, the guttural screams of black metal, pure silence, or anything in between.