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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I'm so fascinated how this varies so much person to person.

For me, my biggest "focus" times are almost always with noise-cancelling headphones on with blaring music that I don't have to think too much about (no vocals, etc). Even when I'm alone in the office, I still need something like that to be at maximum productivity.

However, if I can hear people talking around me, my mind almost immediately gravitates toward their conversation; one of the biggest distractions to my work.

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As someone who has worked in music for several years, I find that listening to it makes focusing on any other task, like coding, much more difficult. Even without vocals, I can't help getting distracted by details of the production or composition ("oh that's a great snare sound" or "I would have used a tele for that part"). So I tend to work in complete silence, if possible, and an ironic consequence of devoting myself to music is that I never listen to it anymore.

I have the same problem. Music is too interesting to not be distracting when I'm working on things that require my full attention.

I had this same problem for years, and it made me sad because I never listened to music.

Then I realized that it wasn't the case for music I know really well. Even jazz or complicated folk (Chris thile) is great if I listen to an album over and over. I get in the zone. Try an album where you know almost every musical element and lyric. Put the album on repeat and see if it works.

+1. I suggest 80s pop (Genesis, Michael Jackson) - extremely effective imo.

I worked a lot of long hours last week to 977's '80s channel.

I don't always listen to '80s pop, but when I do, it's when I am doing the long late night hours. A habit that goes back to college.

"Land of Confusion" coming on the stream was a highlight of one of the nights. The more tired I got, the more the music was working for me,

http://www.simplynoise.com/

I can filter out people talking (as long as they're not listing numbers when I'm also doing numerical work) but get driven insane by little noises like repeated sniffing, foot-drumming, or even one coworker with a particularly squeaky scroll-wheel whose job seems to be to scroll through log files at high speed all day. The first two of these seem to cut through any music I put on headphones, too.

So for me a "library rules" office would just mean fewer conversations to drown out the little noises that nobody even realises they're making. I'm sure I unknowingly make some variety of noise that someone else hates too.

Many open-plan offices, if you can't switch to private offices, install white/pink/brown noise makers in order to help mask such sounds. They're not too expensive, try getting your employer to install em:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/science/when-buzz-at-your-...

I use sox sometimes:

sox -t sw -r 44100 -c 2 /dev/zero -t alsa pulse synth pinknoise vol -9 dB band -n 800 1200 fade q 5 30:00 10

It's filtered pink noise; last time I checked sox didn't have a brown noise generator.

Edit: what do you know, I just checked the man page again, and sox does now have a synth brownnoise option. You can play with the "band" parameters (or omit it) based on your local noise spectrum.

Edit 2: you can also use the "bass" and "treble" filters instead of "band"; the former are easier to understand IMO. It's been a long time since I read the sox man page; it's crazy how much it can do.

Thank you! I'd never heard of sox and it looks potentially useful and a lot of fun to play around with.

Thanks for the introduction to a curious tool.

I tried your command on OS X but changing alsa to aiff but nothing plays. Any suggestion?

I worked out that command line years ago, and I don't even remember what it all does. And all of my machines are linux, so I can't test out what it is for OS X. But from looking at the soxformat man page, I'm guessing you might try replacing "alsa pulse" with "coreaudio".

You can also look at the output of "sox -h" to see what audio device drivers your sox has.

Yup. People are often surprised that I can hear their conversations.

Someone will say something in the next room, with the door open, and I'll answer. They're all WTF you can hear me?

Meanwhile I'm all WTF do you expect, I have LoS and you're only 40 feet away.

Large offspring syndrome?

Line of sight

I've mentioned before how birdsong/dawn chorus is my white noise of choice, and I was pleased to hear on the BBC Radio 4 program "All in the Mind" (about mind/psychology-related issues) about research linking birdsong with a sense of well-being:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p011vdc0

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