I'm a high school student and when I'm studying / working on homework, I often listen to music, but its very hard for me to tell whether or not this is helping me or hindering me from an objective stance. What I've heard from teachers and lecturers seems to be based on their own opinion more then anything else.
It was also the opinion of a person I know that music is good to listen to when you need to do something analytical, but it can easily have adverse effects when you are doing things which require creativity. It's also my own experience that when I'm not listening to music, I start humming myself.
This effect is generally known scientifically as the Mozart effect:
A set of research results that indicate that listening to Mozart's music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks known as "spatial-temporal reasoning;"
In short, are there positive effects of music in terms of learning, memorising, writing and mathematical ability?