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Comment by chrisjharris | Hacker News Reader

Do you listen mostly to music with lyrics or accoustic music? I find the latter helpful but the former quite unhelpful - like trying to do math when somebody next to you is shouting randon numbers. But I have a faint recollection of having read research on this where it depended if you were a visual/verbal/etc thinker, and you were more vulnerable to disruptions occurring within your given thinking method.

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I have perfect pitch and find it impossible to "turn off" the analysis of music - what key is it in, what's the chord progression, and so on. Whether it has lyrics or not doesn't matter, it completely kills any productivity in any other cognitive activity. Only "noise" type sounds work for me when I'm trying to concentrate, like recordings of gentle rain or a babbling brook.

I listen to all sorts of music and it doesn't really change much. Realistically I tune out of the lyrics while I'm focused on something else anyway.

For me, it depends on how familiar I am with the song—if I've heard it a thousand times, the lyrics fade into the background for me. But if it's a new song, for example, my concentration plummets.

I have the (somewhat) opposite problem of needing to concentrate to hear the lyrics of a song. By default the lyrics fade into the background and I only notice the beat and/or musical instruments.

I'm the same way.

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