I know lots of people though who must have music on, or they simply cannot concentrate. For them, it might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to, kind of a rail to help stay on track, and in the absence of that, their mind would wander farther afield.
The way it feels to me is it gives me a consistent background to work. For example, once I have decided on a particular way to solve a problem and its time to code - I put a long DnB track.
Another way to describe it is that it gives my brain's CPU a consistent clock, so to speak xD
When I really get focused on a bit of work, whatever music is playing literally disappears - if you came to me 3min later and offered me $millions to tell you what song just played, I'd get nothing.
Cats are even more amazing - I can't find it right now, but I remember in reading studies in some of my college neuroscience classes where electrodes were put on cats to track their audio system with a clock/metronome sound in the background. You can trace the signal processing up through various nodes of the system at successively higher levels. When a mouse was let into the area, the metronome click trace disappeared from the data of almost every level of processing - it was entirely filtered out almost at the raw audio stage when the mouse showed up. That's focus.
For most tasks, lyric free chill hop is a perfect balance. It replaces the chaos of my environment with a predictable backdrop that can fade out of focus.
But for tasks that require extreme focus, like putting together a novel (to me) algorithm or exploring a new code base, even chillhop is too much. I have to find a place with absolute silence - anything that grabs my attention is devastating to the task at hand.
For the latter example, I wonder how much of it is though neaural networks wired together fire together. In essence Ive always listened to music while riding so it feels right and known, what if I had ridden all this time without music, would I be better? I don't know.
I’ve tried it a couple of years ago, and for me it was mostly repeating tunes and nothing particularly good for programming/focus work.
For me it feels more about familiarity. If I already have the lyrics memorized then it does not feel distracting whereas unfamiliar music can draw my focus.
The human voice is highly distracting for most people.
As I understand it, the relevant studies do not support this.
it's your familiarity with it.
Perhaps the following is too personal of a take, but we're talking about music YMMV ;-)
Here it comes:
Music doesn't make me feel lonely when I'm behind a computer. And feeling lonely is what made me into a mediocre programmer. For years I've not touched a computer because it just feels so isolating when you do it for 8 to 10 hours straight.
But with music, with music I feel a shared experience between me, the artist, the feelings and the concepts. It helps that this form of "musical reasoning" doesn't cost me a lot of brainpower since I've been doing this on autopilot since I was a kid.
For understanding a new concept or problem the finding here probably applies.
I've got about 50 albums that I rotate through while I'm coding and I can focus on the task at hand fairly well with those on, but if I put on a new album by an artist I like, my ability to concentrate on code goes way down.
Listening to music is bad if you're in city traffic and need to use all your attention, but good if you're on a country road and risk just losing focus.
It's not uncommon to hear claims from neurodivergent people about achieving optimal stimulation levels to perform a task. That can be increasing stimulation with music or motion, or decreasing it by blocking out sound with ear plugs. I've seen these play out and it seems to work. I think it's also safe to assume that someone wearing noise cancelling headphones is swapping one set of sounds for a quieter or at least less distracting one. If in fact they aren't just tuning people out by wearing headphones and not playing anything.
And even neurotypical people can maintain throughput on a boring task by accompanying it to music. Laborers and militia just being the most obvious in media. I've talked to a couple of neurodivergent people who admit to "singing" a song in their head while working. Just because you don't hear the music, doesn't mean there's no music.
First, the point of a study is to be generalizeable - that is, to apply to as many people as possible, usually other than oneself. If a particular technique applies to you, that's great! However, most people aren't you. Starting with a known general principle/technique (most people can't multitask) will, on average, put you in a better position than randomly picking someone's anecdotal evidence.
Second, there are many documented cases where self-assessment of one's own traits or capabilities is inaccurate. Performance while cognitively impaired (alcohol & sleep deprivation), assessment of skill as a novice (Dunning-Kruger), and the ability to multitask are all well-known cases of it, with many more lesser known (e.g. whether one is a "visual" or "verbal" learner[1]) - so, you should be wary about having too much self-confidence in your own capabilities, especially for something as poorly-understood as software engineering.
That's why I specified myself. I completely understand the difference between generalizable results and individual results.
> many documented cases where self-assessment of one's own traits or capabilities is inaccurate
I completely understand that self-assessment is flawed, but there is also something to understanding oneself and trusting a self-assessment that is born out over decades of experience. I have never even come close to being as productive as I can be with the right musical piece and sharing this insight with others may prompt further research that sheds new nuance on the topic.
that's the key. You are possibly using 'the right song' to isolate yourself, so that helps you concentrate. The fact that it's on repeat also makes you don't pay much attention to it anymore. But try to listen to 'the wrong song', or worse 'the wrong new song', and it's probably going to have some effect.
I mostly listen to 'concentration music' and lo-fi without vocals. Put something more complex and with lyrics...
Where do you find them?
I think I'm convinced that the difference is how well I know the music - listening to the radio is all songs that I've heard hundreds of times, so I don't think I'm subconsciously spending effort listening to the lyrics since I know them already?
I can't. Especially not with repetitive, melodic music like other siblings say helps them. That's an absolute killer as I starts repeating the melody in my head. Potentially even after I shut the music itself off.
My suspicion is that many people have too many other distractions and music helps them because it's less distracting than the other things. Some people say white noise, such as from an AC helps them sleep. It drives me crazy and I can't fall asleep at all. It does beat a busy street with cars zooming by, revving, honking etc.
Where music can help if there's a mundane repetitive task I need to just get done, because automating it does not make sense at that point. Certain music helps. Allegedly farmers use the same technique to make strawberry pickers faster.
Have you never heard of or witnessed people that turn off their car stereo when they need to drive backwards?
Your TV example I think shows some of this very nicely. You are able to drown out the TV in your head but you aren't able to actually multitask. If you were, you'd know what went on in the show and also get your task done productively. Unless the TV itself drowns out other more distracting things, just not having the TV on would probably be better for concentration.
YMMV in case you are so used to all the noise that you need "something there" because otherwise you get say tinnitus.
I do the TV thing too sometimes but inadvertently. I watch TV, am a little bored perhaps and start say reading HN and at some point notice that the show is over. I totally drowned out the show.
Any time I have vocals / lyrics in music, it drags my attention away - so I only listen to non-vocal (in my case electronic) music.
For me, and one of the reasons I HATE open office plans, I cannot focus if I can almost hear a conversation. Speaking at a normal tone would be far less distracting. Similarly, someone is speaking in a language with too many borrow words in English. Overhearing Germanic languages in particular, my brain keeps trying to treat it like an English speaker with mush-mouth or having a stroke. If I just squeeze my brain harder with my furrowed brow, it will all make sense.
Not so fast.
Actually, listening can help you focus IF it helps you block some other distraction AND you choose something that you can stop focusing on.
When I worked at the office I used headphones whenever I wanted to block off chatter around me.
I also have tinnitus -- light music helps me mask it so it stops being distracting.
The part about Movies and Social media makes sense. They are both "heavy" tasks, so they each have their demand. But Music? I would say it depends on the music. Some is distracting, some not. There is optimized music for concentration, usually found in video games. But there is also "heavy" music that demands your attention, IMHO usually those with lyrics, especially inspirational lyrics.
I'm curious whether they checked the type of music in those studies.
Or how does an open office compare to listening to music?
For me I sometimes use music to mollify ruminative thoughts or feelings that intrude and distract me. Which results in a net increase in focus. Similar for the din of the open office.
When I need deep thinking time both background noise and music are too interruptive or distracting and I need full silence. But I don’t require that level of focus all the time.
For activities that require more intellectual attention, the articles assertion would be accurate to me personally.
But what is a task? You emphasize the term and I have a general concept of what a task is in work and other contexts. But that seems too fluid to make broad statements about human behavior - even with studies combining two activities. How do we know one person's doing a task isn't another person's multitasking? It's intuitively plausible that two activities logically will be somewhat harder than doing each in sequence. But are all such combinations identical? A lot of challenging activities do involve the combination of subtasks - firefighters might break into a building looking for survivors while monitoring the situation of the building for safety. Just about any video involves satisfying multiple constraint simulateously, if they didn't, they'd be boring, etc.
Unplug! Take off your head phones! .... Close the door.
Like many artists, I had the habit of listening to classical music or jazz while working. On one of my first visits to Milt Kahl I innocently asked:
"Milt, Do you ever listen to classical music while you're working?"
"[Expletives]...! I'm not smart enough to think of more than one thing at a time!"
Since it came from a genius, this made quite an impression on me. After this I learnt to face the silence and think before swirling my pencil around. My animation improved right away.
This has been the case with many artists when I've passed this wisdom along. .... They were even more surprised at the startling improvement in their work.
[Image of artist with shirt that reads, "animation is concentration"]
Music, to me, seems to be the perfumed room deodorizer of noisy environments - it drowns out something that’s a problem rather than lending concentration. I understand why people use it in open workspaces.
When running or exercising music is great because it distracts the conscious mind and lets you avoid getting lost in thought. I think this is the same task it serves when, for example, coding. But hard tasks require that otherwise distracted mind and that’s where it falls apart.
But obviously YMMV.
There is no actual definition of what would constitute a “task” here and that alone makes all of it quite dubious in the way you outline and any other things in how it's often extrapolated.
These are definitely not all same, unless you're literally just spinning the mouse wheel like a fidget spinner or watching a Fast & Furious movie. Even more complex music isn't the same as ambient or generic background music.
There was a time in my life (when I owned a desktop) that I would listen to music, play a livestream, play a video game cooperatively, and voice chat with my cooperative partner.
It was the perfect stimulation that would have me focused deeply on the conversation as the gameplay was the topic du jour. It came second-nature.
My favorite lately is the La Palma volcano live-streams.
All that phrase means is that an habit of listening to music while you do something is correlated with lessen focus while not listening to music.
There's no causality there, and there's nothing about how deep is the focus while listening to music.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248
That's not to say other areas are better by default. There is just a lot of junk science out there. "Study says X" is meaningless to me personally. "Study X was reproduced by A, B, C" is something I'd take notice of.
Tragic though, for advertisers.
Trance is distracting for me, but melodic progression works well for me, and sometimes vocal chillout trance. I still have to process random stuff with background noise from an urban setting, even on one of those noise generators.
Back when I was living in a more rural setting, the song birds, the wind between the trees, the rain makes for something that is easier for me to focus.
That is what works for me. My wife has difficulty concentrating without Netflix in the background.
Music helps me focus more than say, a noisy coffee shop.
> Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task.
This was novel to me. Listening to music negatively affects your ability to focus? I guess it's time to throw out my headphones...
Well, but that article links to "Multicosts of Multitasking"[1], which references studies made on "heavy multitaskers", defined as having high "MMI" scores. What's MMI?
"A high MMI score means an individual engages in a lot of media multitasking (e.g., checking email while also perusing Facebook and watching Netflix), and a low score means he or she does not (e.g., checking email without any secondary media)."
Whoa there - checking Netflix and Facebook are completely different than listening to music, and it should be obvious that the former two are mutually exclusive with performing other tasks (simultaneously) - but that doesn't imply the same for music.
I think that the HN submission page might be making some unsupported claims...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/