Should music be heard while studying?

Music while studying - good or bad?

A little bit of research went into concluding what I am about to say, I even tested some hypotheses (unpublished & for fun).

6 things you should know before you turn on the music while studying

(10/10 for the clickbait-y title, right?)

These are some guidelines based on experimental data you should be aware of before you make your playlist and get to studying.

1. Music is a stimulus which is attractive. That means it will draw your attention. People's attention is generally very limited and you might not want to waste your attention on things not related to studying. Although, there is one exception. If you have ADHD or ADD, background noise or light music could stimulate you just enough for you to feel at ease and not seek out more distraction. Light electronic or ambient music works best if you have ADHD. 

2. Our ears are primed to attend to the human voice. So music with vocals is a bad idea, it will distract you. Music with guitar, violins, saxophone, trumpets, etc. is also a bad idea because the timbre (sound) of these instruments is such that it overlaps with the human voice. In fact, the general frequency range of the notes played on these instruments is very similar to that of our voices so our brains will automatically get distracted. If you are using your short-term memory for computations, such music will certainly hamper learning. 

3. A lot of memory experiments have been done with music and a general finding is that recall of what you learn while listening to music is better IF you recall it later while listening to that same music again. So if you learn with music playing in the background and you don't have access to the same music while performing a test on what you have learnt, your recall will be compromised.

4. Partially contradicting the previous point I've mentioned...If you are a musician and you have learnt how to remember details of a song or learn the notes of your instrument, etc. you can make associations with memory tasks. For example, making a tune of something you have to remember, like a mnemonic. You could learn something by singing it or giving it a rhythm, etc. Because, if you are a musician, you probably have developed an intuitive way to understand your notes. So it is easy for you to remember what bit of information is associated with a particular note. 

5. When you are reading papers or essays, you shouldn't listen to any music as repetition in music automatically demands more attention. On the other hand, if you are working on visual design, or looking for creative outputs, the background noise/music can help you get out of a mental block. As music affects a lot of different brain regions which aid in different cognitive abilities, you might just get lucky and think creatively because the music stimulated a certain brain region. So in this case (for creative work) music could benefit you WHILE working on the task at hand or your study material.

6. For conceptual understanding in any subject: Don't listen to music. Period. Use all your attention and working memory to take mental notes, revise and chunk important information. Focus all of your energy on mentally making the theory come 'alive' in your head (visualize, narrate a story, physically walk through it, etc.). Leaving the specifics of this aside as it is irrelevant here. I'll provide details in the comments section if you need more.

I will conclude that you shouldn't listen to music while studying unless:

1. You are diagnosed with ADHD and need some background stimulation 
2. Working on creative things 
3. You are studying very casually and don't mind working at a slow pace 

Summary: Listening to music will hamper memory tasks, calculations, and attention to detail for most people. Creativity seems to be the exception.

I've written another post on the topic which specifically looks at the influence of music on work-related productivity and creativity 

Resources:

1. A coherence effect in multimedia learning: The case for minimizing irrelevant sounds in the design of multimedia instructional messages. 
2. Effects of background music on phonological short-term memory
3. Music for Your ADHD ears
4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/d...

P.S. If at all you choose to listen to music, keep it low volume, just enough to comfortably talk over successfully

P.P.S. I write a lot on quora about certain topics, you'll occasionally find content that is common to my quora profile and this blog!