Most of us currently spend most of our days alone, at home trying to work and it is eerily quiet. There is no office chatter, your neighbours barely leave the house so your street is empty and you’re getting to a point where even your colleague's annoying mechanical keyboard is something to reminisce about. If you’re like me, to not go crazy you listen to music, podcasts or leave the TV on. But let’s not lie to ourselves — all of these attempts to feel less alone are ridiculously distracting.
The good news is that there are certain sounds out there that will not distract you, but rather have the opposite effect — they will enhance your focus and performance. According to my research, there are three categories of sound that can help you out with work — familiar music, scienced-up music and binaural beats. I will give you a rundown on what they are, how they can help and how you can use them. As with our other articles, we encourage you to pick and experiment with the different approaches to see what works for you.
Familiar Music
You might have wondered why your favourite Spotify playlist or Youtube study Livestream work and why others don’t. Why do we keep coming back to ChilledCow’s “lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to”. The answer comes from an unexpected place — video game music. Video game music is designed in a way that keeps you focused and peeled to the game you are playing, and it is remarkably effective. In “Hyperfocus”, Jerry Martin, the composer behind the Sims soundtrack, suggests that productive music needs to be relatively simple and sound familiar. Let’s break that down.
Music that makes you more focused has to sound familiar to you. This is why music that helps you might not help your coworker. It quite clearly explains why certain focus playlists work better for you and others don’t. If you’ve never been into classical music, chances are that someone else’s playlist of relaxing and focus inducing classical music won’t work for you. Lofi hip hop radio works for me because I was (and still am) a 50 Cent fan. It’s as simple as that.
Productive music also has to sound relatively simple. Club bangers or the new Death Grips album won’t cut it. To paraphrase Jerry Martin — music that has a lot of structure in it requires your focus. The best music for productivity is music that “exists in the background”. If you focus in on it there is not that much going on. Also, to point out the obvious — simple music never has lyrics in it because lyrics require focus. If you crave a human voice, try listening to a simple song in a foreign language.
So, my recommendation — make a playlist of simple, familiar music that has no lyrics in it. If you don’t have a huge arsenal of such songs at the ready, get inspiration from various productivity playlists, find songs you like, and slowly start building your own. For fun throw in a couple of absolutely distracting but very energising songs that can give you a random break every once in a while.
Scienced-up Music
Our second category is what I’d like to call Scienced-up Music — music made by startups that promise you that their Ambiental playlists can help you relax, focus, unwind and sleep. They usually claim that the sounds were composed in line with some random science that makes it seem more legitimate. The reason why I’m writing about this category at all is that to my surprise, Scienced-Up Music works incredibly well. Let’s cover some examples and see what this is all about.
First, there is Brain.fm who has a “science-first approach” and makes music that “sounds different” and “affects your brain differently than any other music”. Let’s look into the “science”. Apparently they have patents for creating functional music that can elicit strong neural phase-locking which allows neurons to coordinate. After a brief Google Scholar Search, I found a definition provided by the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (See references) — “Phase locking is the mechanism by which the peripheral auditory system keeps track of the times of occurrence of the ongoing amplitude fluctuations in sounds.” Not exactly the same thing as what Brain.fm thinks phase locking is.
My take? I think that Brain.fm works for the same reasons why other music works, as discussed in the previous section. On their website, they report a study where they looked at the effects of their music on the brain, accompanied by behavioural tests that measured performance. They also go on to say that their focus music “removes sound events that would grab your attention” an aspect of music they call ‘salience reduction’. This is exactly the point that Jerry Martin made — simple music that doesn’t require your focus can be used to improve your focus. It might be the case the Brain.fm actually triggers what they think a neural phase lock is, but I find Jerry’s explanation much more parsimonious. Brain.fm through it’s simple and peaceful music, and perhaps a dash of a placebo, works incredibly well. You should give it a try.
Another example of Scienced-Up music comes from Endel, a beautifully designed app that creates an “audio ecosystem” (how poetic) which they define as “personalized, sound-based, adaptive environments that help people focus and relax.” Endel starts with the very simple premise that sound can have a direct impact on our wellbeing. Put simply, relaxing sounds can reduce stress — true, we’ve all experienced this. It goes on to say that its algorithms change based on a person’s location and weather. Although this is a nice feature, I don’t fully see how this contributes to focus. The interesting part comes from the fact that wearable users get a version of Endel that responds to their heart rate. Heart rate goes up, Endel becomes more relaxing, heart rate goes down, Endel becomes more energising. This very simple feature makes all the difference, but apart from that Endel uses the same principles used by video game music designers — Simple and Familiar (they use the pentatonic scale — a sound which is familiar if you’ve ever listened to, well, music). As with Brain.fm, for me, Endel works like a charm.
Binaural Beats
This brings us to the infamous Binaural Beats, sounds that are generated when two different pure-tone sine waves are plaid to a listener at the same time, one through each ear. The difference in tones creates an auditory illusion of a third tone, which is called a binaural beat. The binaural beat has a perceived pitch that corresponds to the difference between the frequencies of the two pure tones. Research for the benefits of binaural beats is still inconclusive but binaural beats are said to reduce stress and increase focus and concentration. Believers in binaural beats are convinced that they increase the activity of brain-waves that can help us with the task at hand — alpha waves for focus, theta and delta waves for rest and sleep, etc.
At this point, I’m going to level with you. I have no intention on becoming well-versed on brain-waves in order to complete this article, so I’m going to leave it to neuroscientists Hector Perez, Guillaume Dumas and Guillaume Dumas to help us out. In an article they’ve published this year (See references), they found that binaural beats are “no more effective than other sounds.” For the same reason why other sounds are effective (as we’ve already covered), binaural beats (with a splash of placebo) are effective. Paradoxically, as with scienced up music, for me, they work like a charm.
References
I didn’t just pull this stuff from thin air. I read a bunch of scientific journals and articles and played around with how they could help me and other people to work better. Here are some that I really recommend:
Bailey, C. (2018). Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More. Macmillan.
Brain.fm White Paper https://www.brain.fm/assets/pdfs/white-paper.pdf
D.J. Tollin, T.C.T. Yin, Sound Localization: Neural Mechanisms, Editor(s): Larry R. Squire, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, Academic Press, 2009, Pages 137–144,
Endel’s Science https://endel.io/science/
Perez, H. D. O., Dumas, G., & Lehmann, A. (2020). Binaural Beats through the auditory pathway: from brainstem to connectivity patterns. Eneuro, 7(2).
“What are binaural beats, and how do they work?” in Medical News Today www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320019
