Like many teenagers, I have an obsession with TikTok. And like many college students, I sometimes procrastinate on my homework. Recently while scrolling through my ‘for you page’ I saw people my age listening to the song “No Wind Resistance!” by Kinneret and claiming that it made hours of work take way less time. I’m always looking for ways to finish my lengthy homework assignments quickly, so my interest peaked at this. Usually, I need to do homework in silence, so I don’t listen to music. I know lots of people who like to listen to instrumental beats or calming music to help them work. Research shows that classical music and nature sounds help the most. Since I typically need silence, I decided to try comparing “No Wind Resistance!” to lo-fi beats and classical music to complete my homework and see which worked best.
I started by listening to “No Wind Resistance!” first. I saw comments on TikTok that said the trend only worked because the song became too annoying which motivated them to finish faster. I fully expected this to be the case. The song is good, but you can listen to one song for a long period of time without it eventually becoming unbearable. I found a playlist on Spotify that consisted only of that song and– pointlessly– put it on shuffle. The first assignment that I worked on using the song was my math homework. Math is usually one of my weaker subjects and I was extra curious to see how this worked. I might sound crazy, but I really thought it helped! I eventually tuned out the lyrics and was only focused on the beat. Not only was I motivated to do my homework, but I scored pretty well on it. I also tried doing two practice quizzes and I thought using this song was helpful. On the other hand, I tried doing an assigned reading with the song in the background and it wasn’t as helpful. I had to watch videos as a part of the assignment which forced me to silence the music. Overall, I had a harder time paying attention. It actually made me forget to read parts because I wasn’t as clearly focused as I was before.
I also used lo-fi hip hop beats from a premade playlist to compare. I tried this with my other parts of my math work as well. I think it helped tune out the noise coming from my window or just annoying sounds, but it didn’t make me work faster. I also played classical music for studying while working on the other two of my practice math quizzes. This wasn’t extremely distracting, but since it sounded more somber than “No Wind Resistance!” or hip hop beats, I felt almost sad when I was listening to it.
Of the three types of music that I tried out, I honestly can say I thought “No Wind Resistance!” was the best. I wouldn’t say it made me work faster, but it oddly kept me focused on homework like math problems or writing discussion posts. If I had to choose a type of music to listen to in the future for studying, it would be lo-fi hip hop. I think this helped block background noise while keeping me focused. The lack of words is also more helpful when reading. As surprised as I am by this result, I would definitely say that TikTok was onto something when they said to do homework to “No Wind Resistance!”