I think lyrics tend to bring thoughts to the forefront which can interfere with the task at hand. They can conjer images and storylines that force your brain to fill in the gaps, just like watching a movie. Not to mention the thought processes involved with listening to a well-written love song. You better hope your love life is solid or you’ll never get any work done.
For me it works well to listen to music with lyrics that I know so well that I dont even really listen to the lyrics anymore.
In general I feel like music works better if I know it well.
I like to listen to more distracting music though when doing a "boring" task that does not require that much brain processing itself.
Good point! A boring task would definitely free up some of that brain processing.
My coworker watches tv shows on his second monitor and listens to murder-mystery podcasts all day since his job mostly entails cranking out web banners and print ads of various sizes. He could pretty much do it with his eyes closed, as he’s been doing it for so long. Not to mention he’s just damn good at his job.
I guess it all depends on how much of your personal processor you can spare for your current task.
What I'm wondering is, what is it about music WITH lyrics, which interferes with coding? ... is it the language processing side of the brain being overloaded or just distracted from the task at hand ( which would be translation...right? ) i.e. coding == actively translating tasks and concepts into a machine's language.