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Music in sport and exercise
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· January 2011
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The Role of Music 1 
1 
Running head: THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN SPORT AND EXERCISE 
CHAPTER 17: Chariots of Fire:
The Role of Music in Sport and Exercise
 
 
Peter C. Terry
University of Southern Queensland, Australia 
and
Costas I. Karageorghis 
Brunel University, UK 
“The music gives me a rhythm that fits in with my record pace.”
 
(Haile Gebrselassie, double Olympic 10,000 m champion)
 

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The Role of Music 2 
2 
Introduction 
The cultural pursuits of playing and listening to music are extremely widespread and 
almost as old as civilization itself. Music applications in physical activity developed rapidly 
in the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the popularity of exercise-to-music classes in the western 
world. This growth extended from group to individual exercise when personal listening 
devices such as Nike‟s 
Personal Sport Audio
™ reached the mass market. During the same 
period, music was integrated into many professional sporting events and added considerably 
to the sporting spectacle. More recently, since the advent of the 
iPod
™, there has been an 
explosion in music use by athletes during training and prior to competition, while countless 
millions of exercise participants have made music an essential part of their daily workout. 
The boom in the use of music by athletes and exercisers appeared to take researchers by 
surprise. There was only a trickle of empirical research in the 1980s and 1990s, but this 
trickle has turned into a stream during the present decade.
Intuitively,
 
for a stimulus such as music to be used on a daily basis by so many people for 
such a variety of purposes it 
must
have some benefits. However, of particular interest to 
behavioral scientists is the reliability and reproducibility of any purported effect, its 
magnitude, and the contingencies that surround it. For example, is music as effective during 
high intensity activity as it is during low intensity exercise? Can music provide as much 
benefit for elite athletes as it appears to have for recreational participants? What are the 
important aspects of the music selection process that serve to maximize its potential benefits? 
Moreover, it is possible that music may have no measurable effects on physical performance 
other than to make seemingly monotonous tasks a little more pleasurable. This raises the 
additional question of whether the recent popularity of music use by athletes is a marketing-
led phenomenon, rather than one that is grounded in genuine psychological and physical 
benefits.

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The Role of Music 3 
3 
In this chapter, we have integrated the corpus of research work we have generated over 
the past two decades with the findings of other researchers from around the world, to 
rigorously examine whether music has a meaningful and reliable effect. We describe 
situations in which music is likely to benefit performance, and also address those in which it 
may debilitate performance. We provide applied examples and recommendations throughout 
the chapter that will enable practitioners to use music more judiciously.