Should You Listen to Music While Reading?

I Can't Read With Music On (but Maybe You Can)

When I read it's silent. But I never chose the silence. It comes with the timing of my usual reading windows on most days (in bed at night and again before I get out of bed in the morning→). Those are wind-down or general quite hours; nothing's playing anyway. Put me on a train or in a café in the middle of the day and I genuinely don't mind ambient noise, even soft music in the background. So I'm not a silence purist.

What I can't do is read while words are playing. A show on in the next room or someone singing along to a song starts competing with the sentence in front of me. But there are also people I notice that read on packed, noisy trains, and I've got friends who keep music on all day and read straight through it, perfectly happy. So the question is: does music help or hurt reading, who does it help, and why can some people do the thing you and I can't? The research has a surprising answer; it comes down to the music and to you.

What the Research Says About Music and Reading

The most-cited study is Perham and Currie (2014), in Applied Cognitive Psychology. They had people read to different soundtracks – silence, instrumental music, and music with lyrics they either liked or disliked. The finding: instrumental music was basically no better or worse than silence for comprehension. Lyrics were the problem. Words being sung at you drag down how much of the page you absorb – and it didn't matter whether you liked the song.

A 2024 study by Sun and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology calls it "interference-by-process": reading is a language task, and lyrics are also a language task, so they fight over the same channel. The more you understand the words being sung, the more they compete – lyrics in a language the readers spoke interfered far more than lyrics in one they didn't. So sound in general doesn't seem to break focus but a second stream of words does.

That same study found people who usually read with music on were far less disrupted than people who don't. Tolerance is trainable. Read with a soundtrack for years and your brain learns to hold the two streams apart. "I can't read with music" is true for me – but it's a fact about my habits, not a law of reading.

Fiction vs Nonfiction: Different Rules

For fiction, an instrumental or ambient soundtrack can earn its place. You're reading for immersion, not analysis, and film-score-style music sets a mood the story can borrow. The music isn't fighting the words. That's why "world of the book" playlists exist, and why the people who love them love them.

Dense nonfiction is where I'd be careful, and the research backs the caution. When you're reading to understand and retain – an argument, a framework, something you actually want to use – you're already using your full language and focus channel. Add lyrics and you're asking that channel to process two streams of words at once, which is the exact thing that tanks comprehension. For hard reading, the safe settings are silence or something low and instrumental with no words. Match the sound to the job: soundtrack the story, protect the study.

Keep in mind that all of this is averages, and you are not an average. The only test that settles it is the one you run on yourself.

Building a Reading Playlist (If You're a Music Reader)

If you read better with something playing, focus on instrumental only. No lyrics, and ideally nothing whose words you know well enough to sing in your head. Keep the volume low and the tempo moderate – so the music stays in the background.

Genres that tend to work:

• Film and video-game scores – written to sit under something else without stealing attention.
• Classical and ambient – centuries of wordless mood, made for the background.
• Lo-fi beats – low-stakes, repetitive, easy to tune out.

The fun extra, if you read fiction: book and author playlists. Some novelists release official soundtracks for their books, and plenty of readers build their own for the world they're living in for a few hundred pages. Pairing the right wordless music with the right story can be a real enhancement. It's not my thing – but if it's yours, go for it.

When Music Helps vs When It Hurts

Music helps your reading when it's doing a job silence can't: masking a worse noise (a loud café, a humming office, a partner's show on TV), setting a mood that pulls you into the page, or acting as a cue – the "reading starts now" signal that gets you to actually open the book. If a soundtrack is what makes you sit down and read, it's already earned its place, whatever a study says.

Music hurts when it's competing instead of supporting: you notice you're listening more than reading, and you've drifted down half a page without absorbing a word. Sound is one lever in your reading environment, and the environment does more work than willpower ever will – more on that in Your Reading Setup Matters More Than Willpower→. And if focus itself is the real struggle, take a look at: Why You Can't Focus on Reading→.

Your Ears, Your Call

So there's no universal answer, which is great. The best reading sound is the one that gets you reading and still lets you understand what you read. For me, that's the quiet that comes free with my wind-down hours. For a friend of mine, it's lo-fi on low when he opens a book. Neither of us is doing it wrong. Sound is just one dial on your reading setup, next to where you read, what you read on, and when. It's also the dial most people never touch, which is a shame, because focus is the most trainable part of reading→.

The only way to find your setting is to notice what actually happens. Read a stretch in silence and a stretch with a soundtrack, and watch which one leaves you with more finished pages and fewer re-read sentences – exactly the kind of pattern that shows up once you track your sessions. But you don't need an app to start tonight: read one chapter quiet, one with music, and pay attention to which pages you actually remember. Your ears will tell you. That's the only study that counts.