I know lots of people though who must have music on, or they simply cannot concentrate. For them, it might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to, kind of a rail to help stay on track, and in the absence of that, their mind would wander farther afield.
When I really get focused on a bit of work, whatever music is playing literally disappears - if you came to me 3min later and offered me $millions to tell you what song just played, I'd get nothing.
Cats are even more amazing - I can't find it right now, but I remember in reading studies in some of my college neuroscience classes where electrodes were put on cats to track their audio system with a clock/metronome sound in the background. You can trace the signal processing up through various nodes of the system at successively higher levels. When a mouse was let into the area, the metronome click trace disappeared from the data of almost every level of processing - it was entirely filtered out almost at the raw audio stage when the mouse showed up. That's focus.
The way it feels to me is it gives me a consistent background to work. For example, once I have decided on a particular way to solve a problem and its time to code - I put a long DnB track.
Another way to describe it is that it gives my brain's CPU a consistent clock, so to speak xD
For most tasks, lyric free chill hop is a perfect balance. It replaces the chaos of my environment with a predictable backdrop that can fade out of focus.
But for tasks that require extreme focus, like putting together a novel (to me) algorithm or exploring a new code base, even chillhop is too much. I have to find a place with absolute silence - anything that grabs my attention is devastating to the task at hand.
it's your familiarity with it.
The human voice is highly distracting for most people.
For the latter example, I wonder how much of it is though neaural networks wired together fire together. In essence Ive always listened to music while riding so it feels right and known, what if I had ridden all this time without music, would I be better? I don't know.
I’ve tried it a couple of years ago, and for me it was mostly repeating tunes and nothing particularly good for programming/focus work.
As I understand it, the relevant studies do not support this.
For me it feels more about familiarity. If I already have the lyrics memorized then it does not feel distracting whereas unfamiliar music can draw my focus.
Perhaps the following is too personal of a take, but we're talking about music YMMV ;-)
Here it comes:
Music doesn't make me feel lonely when I'm behind a computer. And feeling lonely is what made me into a mediocre programmer. For years I've not touched a computer because it just feels so isolating when you do it for 8 to 10 hours straight.
But with music, with music I feel a shared experience between me, the artist, the feelings and the concepts. It helps that this form of "musical reasoning" doesn't cost me a lot of brainpower since I've been doing this on autopilot since I was a kid.
For understanding a new concept or problem the finding here probably applies.
I've got about 50 albums that I rotate through while I'm coding and I can focus on the task at hand fairly well with those on, but if I put on a new album by an artist I like, my ability to concentrate on code goes way down.
Listening to music is bad if you're in city traffic and need to use all your attention, but good if you're on a country road and risk just losing focus.