Last year I started a new job and had this talk with one of my new coworkers, who never even considered that people do this, which surprised me.
Personally, I have been suffering from tinnitus for a while now, so having music (or whitenoise) on my ears makes it far easier to concentrate most of the time.
Type in "jazz cafe" on youtube and you will find 5-6hr versions of easy listening music as background noise. The trick is to have the volume really really low.
I find movie and game soundtracks work well as the music is made to add theme, pace and emotion to a story without distracting from it by drawing attention to itself.
Looping one song repeated sometimes helps.
Slow thematic songs seem to work best for planning and building up a mental vision to execute against, followed by something with a fast epic driving pace to execute against the built up vision.
It can make work feel quite epic when it works!
I can't do podcast and books while working unless doing extremely menial tasks - the kind that I cut out of my routine or find some way to automate.
Nowadays I have Spotify, but lastfm for some reason was much better.
There was a period inbetween these, where I used winamp back in the days, but there were quite a lot of flash websites with playlists.
I listen to whatever I feel like, from Instrumental music, hip hop, punk, jazz, blues, African music, South American, eastern Asian, Balkan, funk, soul, etc.
Depends! 2019 was mostly Khruangbin, I think.
I am also a musician and any sort of music DEMANDS my attention.
I am not able to listen to music passively.
If it is focused work mainly electronic music and soundtracks.
Less focused I'll listen to podcasts or even audio books.
I even have a few tracks I'll just put on repeat (single track) if I really need to focus on something.
Night Rider Playlist (By Spotify) Tron Soundtrack (Daft Punk) Social Network Soundtrack The Naked and Famous Information Society Pet Shop Boys Eminem Anjunadeep
To answer your question: always instrumental. Ambient soundscapes for exploratory work, or to take a breather and think laterally. Then some jazzy house to crack down and get some work in.
This week that pair’s looking like Rhubarb[1] and Emotional Intelligence[2].
[1] https://open.spotify.com/track/2Bc4llhjJBW77I552RgA3L [2] https://open.spotify.com/track/3yMYs3jJdAPxMgqb0CYZUG
> Personally, I have been suffering from tinnitus
Reading the word made be hear my oh so familiar tone. It's fairly low intensity and I compared it to tone files to be ~14kHz. Will stop noticing when I get deep into something: gotta go, StarCraft2 calls.
When i realized this, i got worried about it amd did some research, found some interesting stuff.
Here is what i found (Papers):
The cognitive effects of listening to background music: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197792/pdf/fna...
TL DR: This study aimed to address this imbalance by assessing the impact of different types of background music on cognitive tasks tapping declarative memory and processing speed in older adults. Overall, background music tended to improve performance over no music and white noise, but not always in the same manner
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The Influence of Background Music on Learning in the Light of Different Theoretical Perspectives and the Role of Working Memory Capacity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5671572/pdf/fps...
TL DR: measure learning outcomes we tested recall and comprehension. We did not find a mediation effect between background music and arousal or mood on learning outcomes. In addition, for recall performance there were no main effects of background music or working memory capacity, nor an interaction effect of these factors. However, when considering comprehension we did find an interaction between background music and working memory capacity: the higher the learners’ working memory capacity, the better they learned with background music.
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Correlation between work concentration level and background music: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19759431/
TL DR: The findings showed that, in comparison with "no music at all", those who listened to music prior to testing obtained higher scores in attentiveness (most probably a supplemental effect of the music), whereas those who listened to music during attention test showed extremely high level of variation in attention test scoring. Background music does affect people's job-site behavior
That being said if I really need to concentrate on something silence is best for me.
post rock
long form
minimal vocals
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Isis
Mono
Mogwai
Eluvium
Caspian
Pelican
Red Sparowes
Worm Ouroboros
Do Make Say Think
This Will Destroy You- Music blocks ambient noise to aid focus.
- Higher energy beats help work tempo.
- Lyrics dont interest me so it becomes background.
When debugging, silence.
When documenting, slow / smooth.
To get something done, mostly.