<p><span lang="EN-US">The effects of listening to or having music in the background is highly relevant to both students and workers in today’s society, as they go about performing their daily academic or work-related tasks.<span>  </span>To investigate this, a total of 93 participants were recruited for this study (50 males and 43 females, with a mean age of 25.63), whereby they completed two tasks being word recall and reading comprehension, while exposed to vocal pop, instrumental pop and no music experimental conditions.<span>  </span>With the scores on these tasks as dependent variables, a significant main effect was observed for music on task performance.<span>  </span>Further analysis revealed that music affected only reading comprehension and not the word recall task.<span>  </span>There was also no significant difference between the mean scores of reading comprehension in both vocal and instrumental music conditions.</span></p>