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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Speaking about an opposite thing: am I the only one who gets terribly distracted by any hint of human speech in the ambient sounds? In my case, it completely destroys concentration; my mind immediately switches to listening mode, trying to understand the speech and tune in to the conversation.

This is why I only listen to the instrumental music during work, and pain to hear an occasional phrase dropped into a perfectly good IDM / synthwave / electronica track. I wish a "speech-free" tag existed e.g. on Bandcamp; some artists helpfully put annotations on their albums, e.g. Master Boot Record's "100% dehumanized", but apparently most artists and likely listeners do not see the presence of words as a large differentiator.

I know 2-3 of my friends who exhibit a similar effect. I wonder if it's rare, or not so rare but not noticed much.

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I experience something similar, but it seems to have more to do with *how familiar* I am with the song. If it's something I've never heard before, it's much more distracting- even if it doesn't have words. On the other hand, if I've listened to it a lot, it seems to have the opposite effect, and helps me concentrate.

I get this when trying to fall asleep, too: I can't fall asleep while watching something new! But give me an episode of Futurama I've watched about six hundred and thirty-two times, and I'll be out like a light. :)

That being said, this site is interesting because the speech is somewhat less distinct and has the odd cadence of aviation radio. I'll give it a listen for awhile and see if I get the same effect as you.

This effect of media familiarity is exactly the same for me: I can be very creating when listening to an old playlist, but can't think at all when listening to something new.

Not all people seem to be like this though, as I have friends that listen to the radio/randomly recommended Spotify songs at work.

Yup, same here. It's why I also mostly listen to instrumental music. A lot of Aphex Twin. On top of that, when I listen to (catchy) music with lyrics, it keeps looping in the background of my brain non-stop, sometimes multiple days. A positive -sort of related- thing: it's very easy for me to listen to audio-books while driving or doing other things and not miss anything because I'm so focused on the speech.

I definitely get where you are coming from. I've been known to listen to music in languages I don't know as a bit of a work around for that.

I even get distracted by those.

Lol I started listening to Spanish music to work around that issue as well, but when I listen to the same song so long I can get used to it, plus I speak a basic level of Spanish.

Same here. Switching to Japanese helped, until I achieved a basic level of Japanese. This also killed Korean lyrics, because Korean sounds similar enough to Japanese to trigger my attention, but I can't understand a word! :-D

This has been studied before and it seems that yes your brain has trouble ignoring music with lyrics.

Based on this study[1] you lose at least 10 IQ points when studying and listening to music with lyrics.

[1] https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/12/04/listening-to-class...

Hrm. The study's size of 25 participants, and the inherent variance of IQ score estimation both seem to smell more of a confirmation bias than a legit anything else.

> am I the only one who gets terribly distracted by any hint of human speech in the ambient sounds? In my case, it completely destroys concentration

I’m the same, which is why my favorite ambient music for work is black metal. You still get music that mirrors how troubleshooting kubernetes makes you feel, but you couldn’t hear the lyrics if you tried :-)

...and it also contains mysterious unholy-sounding incantations, like some kubectl command line full of literal hex.

True, but on the other hand I also get distracted at instruments x) Classical music especially is a no-no, I'll get too interested and stop paying attention to what I'm doing lol.

However, ambient sounds are perfect. I'll never get tired of plugging this: mynoise.net

Me too, but only when my work involves words. When I was in photoshop all day I listened to podcasts constantly and did fine.

It looks like working with text and listening to speech requires the same language-processing brain circuitry, and it's not optimized for parallel processing.

Same. That's why when I'm working, I listen to either classical music, or metal music where the words are unintelligible.

Indeed, some classical choir parts apparently have highly significant lyrics, but even discerning words boundaries in these walls of sound is so hard that it does not trigger my comprehension.

I have this, but I also love lyrical music as opposed to just instrumental tracks. My solution was listening to music in languages I don't understand (French, Icelandic, etc) where there's still the tonal patterns and vocal layering, but doesn't flip my brain into "speech processing" mode.

No, it's absolutely normal. It's difficult to ignore voices.

The same way it's difficult to tell the color of a written word if the word itself is a color.

I was just thinking exactly the same thing - this is nice, but _so_ distracting. I typically listen to the Lounge channel on DI.FM for happy chillout background vibes that don’t distract

Late 10s Chillwave works for me though

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