The Best Music for Productivity is Silence

The Best Music for Productivity is Silence

When silence and music were put head to head in more cognitively complex tests, people did better in silence.

The more engaging the music is, the worse it is for concentration. Music with lyrics is dreadful for verbal tasks. Music with lots of variation has been found to impair performance - even if the person enjoys it. A just-out conference paper showed that music and speech, compared with white noise, made study subjects more annoyed and hurt their scores on memory and math tests.

Some studies - one that used meditative Koan music and another that used quiet classical music ‘showed slightly positive effects of background noise on task performance. But lyric-free music is less distracting, and some of the people whose performance was improved may have come up with subconscious mental hacks to avoid getting sidetracked by music.

The reason this doesn’t work for most people, is most people can’t pay attention to very much at once. Lyrics can soak up precious attention, as can flashing lights or a really bad smell.

“You’ve got semantic information that you’re trying to use when you’re reading a book, and you’ve got semantic information from the lyrics”. “If you can understand the lyrics, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, it will impair your performance of reading comprehension.”

If you simply can’t go a day without your beats, ’take a break every few hours and listen to music for 15 minutes. (There’s some evidence that listening to music between tasks can boost performance.) Then go back to your silent cave.