Music I code to. Part 1.

You may, or you may not be in love with music. Either way is totally fine. But what if we tried to change our perspective on the how, the why and the when we listen to music?

Music is distraction

So you put your headphones on when you commute, go shopping, stand in line, and so forth. Of course, this is not the sole purpose that music serves us. Most of us do, in fact, appreciate the aesthetic component of music, but practically speaking, a vast majority of people use music as a distraction from our daily routine.

Technically speaking, it is the music's contrast with the silence that makes us distracted. Envision (pun intended) an animated jazz quartet, or, say, a rock band in the middle of an engaging performance. To put it simply, the instruments that you hear are vibrations of different frequencies that travel to our eardrum and then the brain decodes them.

Why does music distract us? The answer hides in the image above. Each spike in the spectrum is a disturbance of silence, which we learned to respond to in the course of evolution. Imagine the following experiment: you put your headphones on, you crank the volume up, and you are to listen to a sequence of a randomly triggered snare drums. Would you find it easy to concentrate under such circumstances? The chances are pretty slim.

There is extensive research regarding the effect of sound on the human brain, and most of it is unanimous on the fact that noise and human speech has a detrimental effect on our ability to focus.

"It's so critical to your environment, knowing that something else is moving near you, whether it's a predator or it's food. Everywhere you go, there is vibration, and it tells you something." Seth Horowitz, author of the book The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind

Music is focus

But what if music wouldn't necessarily stand for an energetic and frequency-dense sequence of sounds? What about types of music like drone, or ambient, to name a few? Shouldn't a continuous and uniform stream of sound have a beneficial effect on our ability to concentrate on a particular task?

The article published in the Psychology of Music Journal, called "The effect of music listening on work performance", analyzes the effect ambient music has on the quality of work done by software developers. It found that the quality of work produced by the developers had increased after repeated exposure to ambient music.

When speaking of ambient music, there is often a thin line between music per se and noise. Some people find that they find light ambient noise comfortable for work and research finds that it stimulates creativity. Thus, whatever field you activate in, you will find ambient music beneficial for your mundane and dull tasks. Furthermore, even if your tasks demand creative output, this is still a very viable solution.

This is a snapshot of one of my favorite jazz songs ever written - Austin Peralta's "Algiers." You can clearly see how dense the lower end of the frequency is (the left side of the screenshot), how spiked and obtrusive the mid section is. This is very telling of the tension of the song.

And this is a screenshot of a magnificent song written by Emily A. Sprague's "Water Memory 1" – a much more soothing and relaxing piece that comprises polished and even slightly muffled classical instruments. All the action is centralized in a single sweet spot on the spectrum. There aren't any distinct attention-grabbing elements that would make it hard to concentrate on other tasks while listening to it.

I must stress, however, that merely visualizing the frequency spectrum of an audio file does not dissect its essence and cannot predict its sonic qualities to the fullest extent.

I have been intensely exploring music for over a decade now. I've been "places" people don't normally go, musically speaking, at times risking a day's good mood (sometimes my sanity) to explore, accept and form an opinion about a genre, current, or even tradition. Since this blog post is called Music I code to, I'll give you my recent findings, along with some all-time-favorites, in the realm of ambient music, and its subgenres, that I find incredibly helpful while working, alongside with being amazing musical and aesthetical efforts.