Listening to slightly different sounds in each ear may boost focus, teen finds

As a longtime piano player, Toby Lam is fascinated by how music affects people. He’s done experiments testing how music influences mood and memory. When he learned that attention spans have been shrinking in recent decades, Toby wondered: Could music boost focus? And what he’s found may surprise you.

Toby, 14, set up an online experiment with 65 participants. Everyone played a game where they had to press a key if certain digits appeared on a screen. A third of the participants played in silence. Another third heard the theme song from Nintendo’s Tetris game for half of the task. The final third listened a slightly different tone in each ear for half of the task. Such “binaural” beats give the illusion that someone is listening to a pulsing beat.

Toby then compared players’ reaction times and accuracy. Those who listened to binaural beats did best. Those who heard the Tetris theme performed worst. Toby hopes his results might help students find better ways to focus while studying.

An aspiring chemist, Toby did this project as a seventh grader at Long-View Micro School in Austin, Texas. His research earned him a finalist spot in the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. This program is run by Society for Science, which also publishes Science News Explores.

Here, Toby shares his research experiences and advice.

How did you decide what types of sounds to test?

“When I was researching about what types of music can help our attention spans, binaural beats and video game music were consistently coming up in the search results,” Toby says. “Also, they’re two types of music that I hadn’t studied in previous projects.”

What was your favorite part of the project?

“Once I finally got the results and started to see clear trends,” Toby says. “That was very exciting.” Those trends were not statistically significant. That is, he can’t completely rule out that they arose from chance. “But this doesn’t mean that my experiment was a failure,” he adds. Toby sees it as a launch point for a larger investigation into sound and attention.

How would you investigate further?

“If I were to repeat this study, I would probably … give the participants more time to listen to the music,” Toby says. “That would just allow for much clearer trends and stronger results.” Musicians also tended to do better on the task, his data showed. That’s “really interesting,” Toby says, “and something I could study in the future.”

Any advice for research newbies?

“One helpful resource is Google,” Toby says. “That’s a great way to just get started.” Research can help you decide whether an idea is worth pursuing. And don’t give up, he adds. If you try something and it doesn’t work, failure isn’t a problem, he says. “That’s part of the experimental process.”