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Why Music Is Helpful for Concentration
- 0x008 6y agoCan we change the title to "App for Music for Concentration Tells Us Why Music Is Helpful for Concentration"?
- pavelegorkin 6y agoYeah, it would be honest. But I would like to see any researches saying it does not working
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI linked to such research in my earlier comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629729
- mtalantikite 6y agoEver since I first heard it as a teenager, Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” has been my go to focus music. Almost 20 years later I still put it on if I really am having a hard time getting into a zone of concentration. It’s also a beautiful piece of music to just lay back and listen to, doing nothing else but meditating on the music. Highly recommended.
- pavelegorkin 6y agoREALLY loves this one
- itisit 6y agoNary a study cited indicating that music benefits concentration. I wonder why? The research by and large shows silence is golden when it comes to staying focused and on task.
- victorkolb 6y agoSo what we name silence? Good ambiance or absence of sound?
- tzs 6y agoMost people cannot get silence. There will be some ambient noise, such as traffic, HVAC systems, computer fans, the sound of their own breathing or pulse, animals, creaking furniture, and such. The choice then for most is not between music and silence. It's between music and all those ambient sounds. A lot of those ambient sounds can be very distracting because they are unpredictable and intermittent. If you can listen to music that is just loud enough to mask the ambient noise but not so loud that you have to pay attention to it, it can be less distracting than the ambient noise because music is predictable (at least if you are listening to something you know).
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoThe article is predictably coy about the fact that music is, well, bad for concentration. Studies tend to find that people work better in a quiet environment. [0] The article is rather scattershot, with much of it having nothing to do with music. [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/music-distraction/2012-shih.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/music-distraction/2012-shih.pdf
- victorkolb 6y agoThanks for good paper! As far as I can tell, the paper says about compare two groups: first was listening music with lyrics and second was listening music without lyrics?
- victorkolb 6y agoSorry, my bad! Two groups also had performance score without background music.
- gwern 6y agoThe music distraction literature is really scattershot and heterogeneous, so you can pull out whatever subset you like. The best meta-analysis I know of is "The impact of background music on adult listeners: A meta-analysis" https://www.gwern.net/docs/music-distraction/2011-kampfe.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/music-distraction/2011-kampfe.pdf , Kampfe et al 2011.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoInteresting, thanks for that.
- _xerces_ 6y agoI don't believe evidence supports music being an aid to concentration directly. However, it does make some tasks more tolerable and might extend the time a person is willing to spend on it. Whether the trade-off is worth it, depends on the individual. I will also add that some tasks don't require high levels of concentration, just sustained attention - for example porting code from one similar codebase to another.
- hikerclimb 6y agoNo it isn’t...