Music for reading, with a reading timer
Timer
45:00
Ends with a chime
Open in Spotify to follow the playlist. Not logged in? The player plays 30-second previews.
Nova Focus Plus: Nova Sounds' full catalogue inside the timer, no Spotify needed. Coming soon. Join the waitlist
The short version
Why 45 minutes, with rain
The short answer: if you read with music, choose something without lyrics and keep it quiet. Words in the music compete with the words on the page. Calm piano, ambient music or rain are good choices; for dense or difficult text, silence usually wins.
Forty-five minutes is about one long chapter or a journal article with notes, and it ends before your eyes get tired. For young readers or a class reading slot, use 20 minutes.
What to play
Nova Sounds playlists on Spotify. The first one is also under the timer above.
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First pick · about 25 min
Classical
Instrumental piano and guitar with no words to compete with the words on the page, and a calm pace. It includes some hymns and seasonal pieces; skip them if they catch your ear.
Open in Spotify -
Also good · about 28 min
Ambient
Slow drones, piano and nature textures with almost no melody to follow; a few tracks lean dark.
Open in Spotify
Why lyrics get in the way
Reading is language work, so other language in your ears competes with it. A meta-analysis of 65 studies found that noise, speech and music all had a small negative effect on reading, and that intelligible speech and music with lyrics were the most disruptive (Vasilev et al. 2018). The same review describes older work showing that unattended speech disrupts memory even in a language you do not understand.
Set up a reading session
- Choose the chapter or article before you start, and put your phone face down.
- Start the 45-minute timer with rain or the Classical playlist, at a volume you can talk over.
- Every few pages, stop and say one sentence about what you just read. If you cannot, reread that part.
- When the chime sounds, write three lines of notes, then take a 10-minute break.
What to play for different reading
| Reading | Try |
|---|---|
| A novel for pleasure | Classical or Ambient, or whatever you enjoy |
| Textbook or article you must remember | Rain, pink noise or silence |
| Reading in a noisy place | Brown noise to cover voices |
What the research says
Evidence note: reading is the task where background sound has the most consistent, if small, downside (Vasilev et al. 2018). Music helps some readers enjoy the session more, which is a fair reason to use it for pleasure reading.
Related
All activitiesQuestions
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Instrumental music with a calm, even pace: solo piano, soft guitar, ambient. Avoid lyrics and songs you know well enough to sing along to.
Not bad, but rarely helpful for understanding. Studies find a small negative effect of background sound on reading, largest for speech and lyrics. For pleasure reading, choose what makes you want to keep going.
Around 30 to 45 minutes works for most people, followed by a short break and a few lines of notes. Use 20 minutes for young readers.