Not Everyone Works Better With Background Sound

The advice about background sound is usually handed out as though it applies to everybody. Put something on, it helps you concentrate. For a lot of people that is true. For a lot of other people it quietly is not, and working out which one you are saves a great deal of fiddling with playlists.

There is a well known study behind the standard advice. Ravi Mehta, Rui Zhu and Amar Cheema, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2012, found that a moderate level of ambient noise, around 70 decibels, roughly the hum of a busy cafe, improved performance on creative tasks compared with both a quiet room and a loud one. It is a sound finding and it has been repeated ever since, usually with the caveats left behind.

The caveat worth keeping is that people differ, and quite a lot. Sarah Dobbs, Adrian Furnham and Alastair McClelland gave 118 students three cognitive tasks in silence, with background music, and with background noise, and published the results in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2011. Introverts did worse than extraverts once any sound was added, on all three tasks. Their expectation that music would prove more distracting than noise did not hold up. It was the person, not the sound, that made the difference.

Sensitivity to noise is also more common than the advice assumes. In a survey of 1,100 Finnish adults published by Okokon and colleagues in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015, 35% described themselves as highly sensitive to noise and another 11% as extremely sensitive. That is close to half the sample who would not thank you for the cafe recommendation.

None of this makes background sound a bad idea, and none of it is a diagnosis. It just means the honest answer to whether it helps is that it depends, and that you can find out in about a week.

The test is simple enough. Pick one task you do most days, something with a clear finish, and do it three times: once in whatever quiet you can manage, once with steady natural sound underneath, once with music. Same time of day if you can manage it. Judge it on how far you got and how you felt at the end, not on how it felt at the start, because almost anything feels pleasant in the first five minutes.

If steady sound turns out to suit you, keep it deliberately dull. Rainfall, a stream over stones, wind moving through trees, thunder a long way off. Nothing with words in it, nothing with a tune you already know, nothing that changes enough to become interesting. The job is to give your ears something undemanding so they stop turning towards the door every time it opens.

And if it turns out you are one of the people who genuinely does better in quiet, that is just as useful to know. You are allowed to take the headphones off and stop trying to fix something that was not broken. Keep the mix for the parts of the day that are not concentration, the washing up, the walk, the twenty quiet minutes before bed, where it does a different job and does it well.