Background music isn’t just background noise: Evidence from speech comprehension

Understanding speech amid other sounds is challenging because background sounds can mask target speech and draw on attentional and memory resources. Yet people frequently encounter and seek out background music in everyday settings, from cafes and classrooms to offices. Prior work suggests that background music may engage reward systems and enhance concurrent learning, but most of that evidence comes from performance on visual tasks where acoustic masking is not a concern. Here, we asked whether background music affects comprehension of spoken stories, and which musical characteristics matter. Participants listened to short stories in silence and with five background conditions: intact, reversed, pitch-scrambled, rhythm-jittered, and combined pitch-scrambled and rhythm-jittered music. Performance was best in silence, but also better with intact music than with the combined pitch- and rhythm-disrupted music. Performance in music disrupted in only one dimension (pitch or rhythm) did not differ reliably from intact music. These findings suggest that music may be less disruptive than other background sounds when at least one dimension of predictability, pitch or rhythm, remains intact. Liking ratings and individual sensitivity to musical reward did not reliably predict outcomes, suggesting that structural predictability, rather than subjective preference, influences how background music affects speech comprehension.