The struggles of working with music

I don’t know about anyone else but I struggle to work and revise when I have music on. Well, not all music. If it has words then I can rarely concentrate however if it is wordless I tend to fair much better but even that varies.

So if music causes me to struggle to concentrate then surely I should just not have any music on. However if the room is silent I will focus on every tiny sound and every tiny detail. At uni we have a silent working room which thankfully isn't truly silent. The rustling pages and scribbling pens are quiet enough to not distract but loud enough to make a nice background noise. When I am at my flat however there can be moments of absolute silence. My ears search out for every creak of a pipe or cawing of a bird.

So I don’t need silence but I do need something!

To prove a point I put on some music in the background as I was writing this and all I could focus on was the lyrics. I typed the first word of this sentence and my internal monologue went silent as it was hijacked by my iTunes. I was forcing myself to focus on the words but the moment that intense focus stopped then Gwen Stefani was taking over my thought process.

Now as my music has shuffled itself onto the next song I have the Buffy the Vampire theme song playing. It’s a fast upbeat song with no lyrics and I find myself typing faster and faster to match the music. So clearly I need lyric less music to improve my concentration process.  I delve deep into the world of Youtube in search of some nice instrumental music.

Is it just me or does anyone else find the ‘great for concentration/relaxing/studying/giving birth/brushing your teeth’ music super distracting and sometimes creepy sounding? If modern music can’t help me I go back in time and hope Mozart or Beethoven can help me instead. Which it does for a time! However again I have problems with that. If I use the same playlist I know what songs to expect and find myself pretending to be some sort of great conductor. If I use a playlist with new songs I get distracted and go ‘oh that sounds pretty’, ‘is that a violin?’, ‘how does anyone play this stuff it sounds so complex?’.

So the next thing I try is a background noise generator and this sometimes works wonders and sometimes distracts me more. I found Noisli a while ago and you can mix and save different mixes of the background noises they provide. Now this is great in that I can put the sound of rain with the sound of wind and thunder and that can be great for me sometimes. But again these noises don’t always help me and I sometimes find them more distracting than helpful. I also end up spending my time giving them artsy names like ‘Forbidden Forest’ and ‘The Castle in the Woods’.

I still have not found a solution to this musical problem of mine.

Perhaps the problem isn’t really the music but my ability to concentrate and I’m not sure how to fix that! Any suggestions?

How do you like to work best?

Sophie