Background Music at Work

A painter paints pictures on canvas.
But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopole Stokowski

My work environments usually are noisy — they kind of noise you cannot easily ignore. Colleagues who shout into the phone, an air conditioning unit that is loud (and — even worse — in the next building), neighbors who have nervous breakdowns on the phone, loud conversations, or tune up an instrument for two hours (at least, that’s what it sounded like, music has notes).

So I usually work with noise-cancelling headphones on, happily listening to music (which can be relatively quiet, as environmental noise gets largely blocked out).

Getting music to listen to is not that easy, after all, you don’t want to hear the same track again and again (although there are some to which I have listened to over 2140 times, iTunes keeps track of these things). So, I am a huge fan of last.fm. You simply type in an artist you like and you get similar music. Recently I have found that similar artists to Hans Zimmer (composed a lot of scores for movies) is a good choice. The music that last.fm gets me is usually without vocals, making it easy to concentrate on the task at hand.

Highly recommended.