Classical vs. Pop Music and Reading Comprehension among Music Students: An Exploratory Pilot Study

Background music is widely used by university students during study, yet evidence on whether particular genres support or disrupt concentration remains mixed, especially among trained musicians. This exploratory pilot study examined how classical and pop music related to reading comprehension and subjective concentration among a deliberately small sample of postgraduate music students. Four Master in Music Education students at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam were assigned to one of two conditions: classical music (Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major; n = 2) or pop music (Lady Gaga's "Born This Way"; n = 2). During a remote Google Meet session conducted under COVID-19 constraints, each participant read a neutral chemistry-history text for ten minutes while listening to the assigned track, then answered ten comprehension questions without referring back to the text. Comprehension scores are reported descriptively only (classical: 7/10 and 3/10; pop: 5/10 and 8/10); no inferential statistics were computed, and the small N precludes generalisation. The primary contribution is a Braun and Clarke thematic analysis of questionnaire responses and individual online interviews, which yielded four themes: (1) distraction from understood-language lyrics; (2) musical familiarity, structure, and climactic features; (3) task type as a moderator of music suitability; and (4) individual preference and study habit. Participants consistently described lyrics in languages they understood, high-frequency or bass-heavy pop arrangements, and analytically engaging classical climaxes as disruptive during dense factual reading, while familiar instrumental or non-understood-language tracks were often experienced as less intrusive. The study is framed as hypothesis-generating groundwork for larger, controlled investigations rather than as evidence of causal genre effects

Music

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