We all love listening to music. We listen to it while studying, to help us focus, when we feel sad or mad, among a lot of other things. But do you know what is actually happening inside your head when you listen to music? In the University of Chicago’s Big Brains podcast episode on “How your brain benefits from music with Larry Sherman and Paul Rand”, Larry Sherman says: “Music is a perceiver taking that information from those vibrating air molecules and turning it into something that we perceive as music. Those air molecules, they come in, they get into that part of our eardrum mechanism, and near the cochlea. The cochlea just has these sets of canals that actually respond to different frequencies of sound. So that then triggers all these different neurons that then fire into our brain to our central nervous system up into our auditory cortex.”

I went and asked a few students how listening to music makes them feel. Malik Coplin said “Connected.” Paige Stanoch said “It helps me focus.” Camila Ocampo said “It makes me calm and makes me concentrate.” Augustus Jack said “Kind of just background noise”, and Kamya Logwood said “It feels like I’m in a different dimension.” These are only a fraction of the things that listening to music makes people feel. Maybe you can relate to one of these statements, or maybe you think they’re talking nonsense and that’s not at all what listening to music feels like to you. The great thing about music is it’s all subjective. Everyone can form their own opinions on it and be right in their own ways. 

Not only did all of these students have different ideas of what listening to music feels like, they were also listening to completely different styles and genres: Takedown from K-pop Demon Hunters, Sun to Me by Zach Bryan, annie. by Wave to Earth, Backseat Freestyle by Kendrick Lamar, and Drunk-Dazed by ENHYPEN. There’s also a scientific explanation for that! In the Big Brains podcast, Paul Rand said: “Picking up on tonal patterns from an early age is how we develop our own taste in music. It explains why some people like upbeat music while others prefer something a bit more melancholy”, to which Sherman replied: “[…] there’s a period of time mainly during our adolescence where we form really strong ties to particular types of music. […] So what we like and dislike changes over the course of our lives, but there are certain things and patterns of music that we really kind of get stuck on during our adolescence.” Humans are most impressionable between the ages of 11 to 17, which explains why music preferences vary so much from person to person.

And so, we arrive at the age-old question: is listening to music helpful or harmful for students? The answers are usually split 50-50, with both sides having valid arguments. Some say that listening to music you like will enhance your focus, but others say that you will be too distracted by the music to concentrate on your work. Our good friend Larry Sherman might just have an answer that will appease both sides. He said: “[…] If you’re sitting and trying to study and you hear music that is incredibly emotional to you, you’re going to have all your attention drawn away from whatever it is you’re doing into that music. If you’re playing some music in the background that doesn’t have lyrics and it’s just something that’s not so familiar that you don’t love, it probably has the opposite effect. It actually may enhance your attention.” What he’s saying is that both sides of the argument are correct, in a way. The most beneficial thing you can do to help with concentration is listen to music without words. That way there’s no distracting lyrics, but you still get the same brain boost you would have otherwise gotten from listening to a song with lyrics.

William Shakespeare once said “Music is food for the soul”, and I think he was absolutely right. We all love listening to music. It’s part of the lives of almost every human on Earth, and we all benefit from listening to it. It both literally and metaphorically rewires our brain in a good way, by helping us focus. It’s such an interesting thing to think about: how every person you know most likely has a completely different music taste to you. Maybe that girl in your English class loves upbeat pop songs or melancholy ballads, but the boy next to her likes death metal or rap. If you take away nothing from this story, take away this: Rand said: “Humanity’s relationship with music goes all the way back to our earliest days. Our brains have evolved alongside this magical feature of reality, and it turns out that music may be doing more to and for our brains than we ever realized.”