Do you get motivated to exercise or clean house by listening to fast, upbeat music? When you’re having a dinner party, you probably don’t choose the same tunes, but instead something quieter, beautiful to listen to but unlikely to interfere with conversations. Nearly everyone has and iPod or tablet or MP3 player or some other device to download, store, and play music, and we all walk around with personal soundtracks (even if that’s just music that’s playing over the sound system at the shopping mall). You might be so used to having music all the time that you even read while listening to music – but did you know that some music can slow down your reading speed, even if you’re not consciously listening to it?

Finnish researcher Kari Kallinen did a study in 2002 measuring the reading rate of people listening to different types of music, and concluded that reading speed was faster when they were listening to fast-paced classical music (without words). A 1983 study by David Wolfe at Utah State University concluded that music played too loudly leads to the listener being easily distracted from their task. Most recently, a research project completed in the spring of 2012 by psychology majors Julia Cistera and Yu Liu at the University of Minnesota explored the connection between musical tempo and reading speed. They used a metronome (a device that produces a regular ticking beat) set at various speeds to see how those different speeds would affect reading rates. Cistera and Liu were hoping to find a correlation to Kallinen’s earlier study, but found instead that the ticking of the metronome seemed to be distracting to all participants no matter the rate of speed. In the end, they concluded that it’s music as a whole that has the most potential for beneficial results, and look for further research to be done in this field.

From these studies, it’s clear that music does have an effect on reading speed. In addition, there are several points that can help you choose the right music to listen to for speed reading support:

The music should be fast, but not too fast. Kallinen’s study found that music performed at about 92 beats per minute produced a faster reading speed. However, if you’re listening to music that’s much faster than that, it’s likely that the increase in tempo may create an increase in your stress or adrenaline level, and that will make it harder to focus on your reading. You can use this online metronome to check the speed of your music.

Keep the sound at a low to moderate level for best results. As proved by Wolfe’s study, when music is too loud it leads to more distraction.

Pick music that doesn’t have any words or lyrics. If you think about it, you’re only going to cause problems by making your brain deal with words coming in via your ears, when you really want to concentrate on the words being processed by your eyes. Instrumental music is best.

Listen to music with a gentle beat rather than a pounding rhythm that dominates the sound. The University of Minnesota study proved that if the beat overrides the music itself, readers are both distracted and easily irritated.

Classical music by Bach or Vivaldi is nearly always a good choice, but any music with a moderate tempo, no words (or at least no words in a language you understand), and a subdued beat, that’s played at a sound level that’s not distracting, will enhance your reading experience and help increase your reading speed.

What music stimulates you to faster reading speeds?