Stop and Listen. What do you hear? Music coming through your earphones? The chatter of a coffee shop? The car horn-punctuated midtown din, filtered through library windows? The hum of your computer in an otherwise silent, isolated space?
It would seem prosaic to state that sound is a key aspect of our immediate environments, and that different tasks are best accompanied by different kinds of aural stimuli. A radio show on the most appropriate music for exercise and athletics got me thinking about this again recently. The expert interviewed on the program conveys some rather unsurprising findings: Music can have a positive stimulative effect on people seeking to get the most of their workout; songs with relatively fast tempos are optimal as background music to exercise—125-140 beats per minutes is ideal; changing the tracks in your playlists frequently will maximize the music’s motivational potential by reducing the risk of boredom. On the other hand, music can play a distracting role for elite athletes engaged in intense competition.
On the other end of the spectrum from workout music, pieces with slower tempos and softer sounds can help people fall asleep. What, then, is the ideal sound for that middle ground of activity between heart-pumping exercise and tranquil sleep that most of us are immersed in during the bulk of our waking hours? For the many folks I see with earphones on while ostensibly doing work in libraries and coffee shops, I assume that music is a motivational force. There seems to be a smidgen of scientific evidence out there indicating that listening to music can boost productivity for some people in some settings, and no shortage of advice on what tunes will help you get work done. Of course, workers in many cultures sing and/or use work implements in a musical fashion to coordinate complex tasks and to make boring or repetitive work more interesting. One of my favorite examples of work music is a recording that was made of postal workers at the University of Accra, Ghana in the 1970s:
But there are those of us who can’t envision getting much work done if we tried to type every letter on our computer keyboard in rhythm. (Or, if we broke into office supply-accompanied song. Just couldn’t resist!)
Personally, I can’t even listen to music while doing any work that requires the slightest bit of concentration. The fact that my field of study involves analyzing music in its minute details makes it too difficult to ignore the sounds unfolding around me. But I know that I’m also probably more sensitive to aural stimuli than lots of other people. I’ve never understood how people can concentrate in busy coffee shops, even if there is no background music playing. So imagine my surprise when I learned the other day that there’s a website that will bring the sounds of a coffee shop to your home or office. The Coffitivity site and its related smartphone and tablet apps were apparently inspired by research indicating that the moderate levels of ambient noise typical of coffee shops are optimal for creative thinking. Maybe I’m not a very creative person, since I couldn’t stand more than a few seconds of “morning murmur”—one of Coffitivity’s three coffee shop sound options—streaming through my speakers!
