Introduction
I was recently asked to work on a project to create audio-based learners for people who commute long distances. As I was considering various methodologies and strategies to maximize engagement and retention, I thought to myself “oh yeah, songs!” Not music (as in background instrumental audio tracks that can function as a grounding, association, or emotionally stimulating tool), but songs with lyrics that you could learn and sing along. After all, there are songs I originally heard decades ago that I could recall easily. There are intentionally educational songs that I’ve heard too, such “Yakko’s World” from the 1992 cartoon Animaniacs where the singer teaches world geography (albeit imperfectly), or Conjunction Junction from Schoolhouse Rock (1973). And it occurred to me that, I hadn’t been exposed to any song-based formal education in as long as I could remember. I don’t mean a lack of classes about music, but classes where music was used as a learning device or retention tool. And what stood out to me about the educational songs I could remember, is that they were geared exclusively for children and pre-teens. Once you hit a certain age, music somehow becomes an “inappropriate” means of education. Why is that?
Oral History and The Cultural Baggage of “Edutainment”
Instructional designers love to say “learning sticks when it’s meaningful.” Yet the moment someone suggests using music with adults, the room often tightens. Songs? For professionals? Surely not. Which is curious, because for most of human history, music was the knowledge infrastructure.
Long before slide decks, learning management systems, or competency frameworks, humans encoded survival skills, social norms, laws, and cosmologies in rhythm and melody. Epic poems, chant, and song were not enrichment activities; they were delivery systems for memory. Researchers in anthropology and cognitive psychology have shown that oral traditions relied on repetition, rhyme, and meter because they dramatically improved recall across generations (Rubin, 1995; Foley, 1988).
Music functioned as error correction, compression, and retrieval cue all at once; an elegant mnemonic stack centuries before we named one. So why, in the modern world of adult learning, does music feel like a novelty at best and reputational risk at worst? While the concept predates the word, you might be familiar with “edutainment” (modern English portmanteau of education and entertainment.) which, I believe, carries with it certain cultural assumptions inherited from The Age of Enlightenment (itself emerging from from and built upon the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries).
When the Printing Press Changed What “Knowledge” Looked Like
The story turns pivotally in the fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press did more than make books cheaper… it redefined what counted as legitimate knowledge. When information became stable, visual, and individually consumable, authority shifted away from performance and toward text (Raj & Bansal, 2024; McIntosh, 2025). Knowledge could now be “contained,” standardized, cited, and archived.
This technological shift had pedagogical consequences. Learning became quieter, more solitary, and increasingly visual. Song, with its temporal and performative qualities, began to look suspiciously imprecise next to fixed print. Music didn’t stop working, it simply stopped looking “serious.” Instructional design quietly inherited this worldview.
Standardization Solved Scale, Not Retention
Fast‑forward to the Industrial Revolution, when mass schooling emerged to meet workforce demands. Schools were modeled, explicitly, on factories. Bells, age‑grouped cohorts, uniform curricula, and standardized tests optimized efficiency and comparability, not long‑term memory (Fiveable, 2025; National Education Association, 2020).
Music is inconvenient in a system built for standard outputs. It is expressive, embodied, culturally situated, and variable by performer. Worksheets are cheaper. Multiple‑choice tests are easier to score. Auditing a song‑based learning experience at scale is… awkward. As assessment regimes hardened, learning experiences increasingly rewarded what looked rigorous over what learners actually remembered.
The Jingle Paradox: We Trust Music (Just Not for Learning)
Here’s the irony that instructional designers know but rarely say aloud: every adult organization already believes in music as a learning technology. Advertising researchers have demonstrated for decades that musical “jingles” significantly outperform spoken content for recall and recognition, even years later (Allan, 2006; Shukla, 2022). Entire brand strategies depend on this fact. But we confine this power to commerce. In education, the same technique triggers discomfort. Why? Because music intersects with and activates identity.
“This Is for Kids”: Music and Adult Identity
Music is never neutral. Sociological and music‑education research shows that musical engagement is deeply tied to self‑perception and identity across the lifespan (Creech et al., 2020; MacDonald & Saarikallio, 2024). For many adults, particularly those whose formal music education ended early, song activates a latent judgment: this is childish, this isn’t me, this signals incompetence. Adult learners are exquisitely attuned to signals of status. A poorly framed musical activity can feel like an erosion of professional identity. Instructional designers might sense this risk instinctively and avoid music altogether rather than do it badly. This is one area where there is considerable potential for future growth and change due to the advent of AI music creation and advanced synthetic voices. While it no longer takes “talent” or “artistry” to create “something,” the ease of potential future artifact generation may serve to break down some of the barriers currently facing development.
Institutions Fear Looking Silly More Than Being Forgotten
This ties directly to reputational risk. Universities, government agencies, and corporate learning teams operate under intense symbolic pressure. Seriousness is equated with credibility. A program that feels playful risks being dismissed, regardless of outcomes (Swafford, 2007). Evaluation systems reinforce this bias. Success is measured via completion rates, satisfaction surveys, and short‑term assessments (metrics that privilege compliance over retention). Music shines at long‑term recall, transfer, and emotional salience, but those benefits often surface after the evaluation window closes. An unforgettable learning experience is useless if it fails the exit survey.
Equity and Access: The Unspoken Constraint
There is also a genuine equity concern. Musical forms are culturally coded. What felt universal in one context may alienate learners in another. Institutions rightly worry about reinforcing dominant norms or excluding those with limited exposure to Western musical structures (Barbaro & Hundtoft, 2011). But avoidance is not neutrality. Refusing to engage musicality altogether forfeits one of humanity’s oldest accessible learning tools, particularly for learners underserved by text‑heavy instruction. It also may fail the “sniff test” considering the (modern) historical success and broad cross-cultural permeation of certain musical styles and performers
Why the Pendulum Is Starting to Swing Back
Quietly, though, conditions are changing. Audio‑first learning has resurged through podcasts and spoken‑word learning. As mentioned earlier, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) (here defined as computational systems capable of pattern recognition, generation, and adaptive feedback) are lowering the cost and risk of music creation at scale. Recent research demonstrates that AI‑generated and adaptive melodies can personalize musical content to learner needs while respecting cultural variation (Duarte, 2025; Cheng & Qu, 2025). For instructional designers, this affords opportunity. AI can act as a co‑composer, helping generate short, purposeful musical forms that support memory without demanding musical virtuosity from facilitators. The barrier is no longer largely technical, it is becoming mostly conceptual.
Conclusion: Serious Learning Is Not the Same as Serious Tone
Adult music‑based edutainment is rare not because it fails, but because it challenges inherited assumptions about what learning should look like. The printing press, industrial schooling, identity signaling, institutional risk, and evaluation systems all nudged us away from musicality; not because it was ineffective, but because it was uncomfortable. As instructional designers, our task is not to chase novelty. It is to utilize tools that work, even when they disrupt our aesthetic habits. Music has waited patiently for centuries. It may be time to let it back into the room.