Music with lyrics hurts reading and memory
Lyrics impaired verbal memory, visual memory and reading comprehension compared with silence. Instrumental lo-fi music had no reliable effect either way.
The short version
If you work to music, the words are the problem. In this experiment, popular songs with lyrics made people worse at remembering words, remembering visual layouts and understanding what they read, compared with working in silence. Instrumental lo-fi music had no reliable effect either way. Participants did sense that lyrics were getting in the way — the effect was not invisible to them — yet many people still work with them on.
What the researchers did
Alessandra Souza and Luís Carlos Leal Barbosa at the University of Porto ran an online experiment with psychology students. Each participant did four tasks — verbal recall, visual recall, reading comprehension and arithmetic — under three conditions: silence, instrumental lo-fi hip-hop, and popular music with lyrics in Portuguese, the participants' language. About 136 people took part, with between 106 and 123 included in each task's analysis after exclusions. Participants also rated how they thought the music affected them, both during and after the tasks.
What they found
- Lyrics hurt memory and reading. Compared with silence, music with lyrics lowered verbal recall (d = −0.32), visual recall (d = −0.33) and reading comprehension (d = −0.19). These are small-to-moderate effects, but they appeared consistently.
- Arithmetic barely moved. The effect on arithmetic was small and not credibly different from zero.
- Instrumental music was roughly neutral. Effects ranged from slightly negative to slightly positive and none were reliable. For reading, instrumental music did better than lyrics.
- People partly knew. Participants consistently judged lyrics as harmful to their performance. Many rated instrumental music as neutral or helpful, even though it showed no measurable benefit.
The results fit a long-established finding called the irrelevant speech effect: speech you are not trying to listen to still competes with the language-processing your task needs.
Limits and caveats
The study was online, so volume, headphones and surroundings were not controlled. The sample was mostly female psychology students from one university, and only one style of instrumental music and a handful of songs were tested. The reading task was close to a ceiling, with accuracy above 90%, and the sample was too small to rule out small effects of instrumental music. An older meta-analysis reached a similar overall picture (Kämpfe et al., 2011).
What it means for how you work
For reading, writing, studying or anything that involves holding words in your head, turn off music with lyrics — or switch to instrumental tracks or ambient sound. Silence is at least as good as instrumental music for these tasks. Music with vocals is more defensible for routine, repetitive work where language processing is not the bottleneck. If you want to test it on yourself, compare focus ratings or output for blocks with and without lyrics over a couple of weeks.