Why Music Is Helpful for Concentration | Hacker News Reader

Why Music Is Helpful for Concentration

tinnire.app

11 pointspavelegorkin15 comments

Can we change the title to "App for Music for Concentration Tells Us Why Music Is Helpful for Concentration"?

Yeah, it would be honest. But I would like to see any researches saying it does not working

I linked to such research in my earlier comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629729

The 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

Thanks 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?

Sorry, my bad! Two groups also had performance score without background music.

The 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 , Kampfe et al 2011.

Interesting, thanks for that.

Ever 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.

REALLY loves this one

Nary 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.

So what we name silence? Good ambiance or absence of sound?

Most 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).

I 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.

No it isn’t...

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