Learner Drivers · What the research says

Radio on while you learn? What the research says about music and new drivers

On test day the answer is simple: switch it off. Lessons and practice drives with a parent are less clear-cut, so we read the research. One study put music into a real learner car on real roads. A review pooled twelve studies.

📅 Published October 2026🎵 Learner Drivers⏱ 5 min read

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The Short Answer

For learners, and for the first months on a full licence.

Keep the music off while you are learning: on lessons, on practice drives with a parent, and on any drive that feels hard. The research on new drivers points one way. With music playing they made more serious errors, and in the pooled studies there were more collisions (most of them in driving simulators). The research does not give you a volume or a playlist that is safe to learn with.

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The Study in a Real Learner Car

Israel, 2013: 85 young drivers, six trips each.

Most research on music and driving happens in simulators. Warren Brodsky and Zack Slor at Ben-Gurion University did something rarer: they put 85 young new drivers (average age 17.6) into an instrumented learner car on real roads, for six trips each. Some trips had no music, some had the driver's own music, and some had music the research team had composed to be only moderately complex.

Everyone made mistakes

Every one of the 85 made at least three driving errors across the six trips.

27 needed a warning, 17 needed someone to step in

27 drivers needed a spoken warning or command. 17 needed a steering or braking intervention to prevent an accident.

Their own music: happier, but worse driving

With their own music the drivers were in a better mood and enjoyed the trips more. Those same trips produced the most frequent serious misjudgements, the most violations and the most aggressive driving.

The composed music helped

The music written for the study improved driving behaviour. It was made in a lab and you cannot buy it, so it is not a playlist tip. It suggests that what is playing matters, not only how loud it is.

How we read this study: the figures above come from the paper's own summary (its abstract, as listed on PubMed) and from the method table in the 2019 review below. The full paper is behind a paywall and we have not read it, so we quote nothing beyond that.

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What 12 Studies Found

A 2019 meta-analysis from the University of Miami.

Barbara Millet, Soyeon Ahn and Juan Chattah searched for every experiment that compared driving with and without music. Of 118 publications, 12 met their standards, with 752 drivers between them. Ten of the twelve used driving simulators. Two were on real roads, one of them the learner-car study above.

What got worse with music

Collisions: significantly more. The authors describe the difference as large.
Control of speed and distance: speed, changes in speed and following distance were significantly worse.

What did not change

Reaction time
Keeping position in the lane
Obeying traffic lights and signs

Two surprises. Quiet music was not the safe option: music below about 60 decibels was linked with worse speed control. And tempo made no measurable difference in the pooled results; fast songs did no worse than slow ones. Music the driver did not know was linked with more collisions than music they knew.

One later study disagrees about tempo. In China, Miao and colleagues (2021) gave 37 novice drivers a hazard perception test in simulated traffic. Fast music raised their heart rate and mental load and lowered their scores; with slow music their scores were the best of the four conditions. So the tempo question is still open.

The review's authors also decline to turn their results into rules for drivers. They had too few studies, most were in simulators, and the people tested were mostly born before today's learners. Their conclusion is narrower: music does affect driving, and the effect is not where people expected it.

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What the Rules of the Road Say

No ban on music, but clear instructions.

"If you do use a personal or in-car system, play it at a volume that does not distract or prevent you from hearing emergency sirens or car horns." — Road Safety Authority, Rules of the Road (2026), p. 50

Earphones: the same page says road users should avoid personal entertainment systems through earphones, because they can distract you.
Phones: driving while using a hand-held mobile phone is an offence, with a fixed charge and up to 5 penalty points (p. 50). Our mobile phone law guide explains what counts as using one.
Level crossings: at an unattended level crossing with gates, the book's list for drivers starts with stopping clear of the gates and then "Switch off phone and music systems" (p. 94).
Test day: switch it off before the tester gets in. We answer that one in the test-day questions learners ask.

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Our Advice for Lessons and Practice Drives

Based on the research above.

Lessons: off

A lesson is spoken instructions, feedback and new skills arriving all at once. Give them your full attention; the time is short.

Practice with a parent: off as well

Your supervisor is coaching you too. If you cannot hear "check your mirror", the practice is worth less.

Choose before you move

Searching for a track or a station is a distraction of its own; the 2019 review lists it among the known ways music causes harm. Set it up while parked, or leave it.

Off when it gets hard

A new route, heavy rain, darkness, a busy roundabout: switch it off. You lose nothing by doing it.

On a full licence: something you know, loud enough to hear sirens

If you play music once you hold a full licence, choose music you know, at a volume where you can still hear sirens and horns, as the Rules of the Road ask. Quiet is not automatically safe (see the surprises above), and the research does not show any setting to be safe.

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What Nobody Knows Yet

Where the research runs out.

Real crashes: none of these studies followed drivers for months and counted real-world crashes with and without music.
Talk radio and podcasts: these studies tested music. Speech is a different kind of load and needs its own evidence.
Lyrics: too few studies used music without words to test whether lyrics matter.
Today's learners: most people in these studies grew up before smartphones.

Learn with your full attention

Our lessons are built around spoken coaching and focused practice. Book a lesson, or read what to expect on test day.

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Sources & References

📊 Brodsky, W. & Slor, Z. (2013) — "Background music as a risk factor for distraction among young-novice drivers", Accident Analysis & Prevention, 59, 382–393. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2013.06.022 (abstract)
📊 Millet, B., Ahn, S. & Chattah, J. (2019) — "The impact of music on vehicular performance: A meta-analysis", Transportation Research Part F, 60, 743–760. doi:10.1016/j.trf.2018.10.007
📊 Miao, L., Gu, Y., He, L., Wang, H., Schwebel, D.C. & Shen, Y. (2021) — "The influence of music tempo on mental load and hazard perception of novice drivers", Accident Analysis & Prevention, 157, 106168. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2021.106168 (abstract)
📘 Road Safety Authority — Rules of the Road (2026 edition), pp. 50 and 94