Well thanks for asking.
PhD’ing involves a lot of reading and writing[citation needed]. If you’re like me, you need noise or music to help you concentrate (or to pipe into your noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the sounds of your coworkers having lunch in the kitchenette).
I also find that music is a trigger that gets my brain into a certain state. I have conditioned my brain through repetition so these songs mean work time is occurring (anyone who has set a song they like as their wake-up alarm, then later felt a jolt of panic when that song came on the radio, knows how this conditioning works). To that end, I never listen to these songs/tracks/sounds outside of work time. Be prepared to sacrifice your chosen work music to the PhD gods.
Here’s a list of songs and sounds I use for work.
Current Rotation
Hype-up work
Girl Talk’s album All Day, played on repeat.
I use this one when I have a bunch of energy, usually for when I’m trying to first-draft a writing piece. This has a lot of the movement feeling I need to just get shit on the page. Or if I’m just hyped on coffee. This song is almost always what I listen to when I convert my desk to standing mode.
Settle in for calm focus (repetitive)
I have a Spotify playlist of eight Dodie songs (mostly from her album Build a Problem) that I listen to in a cycle on repeat. It’s just under half an hour, so it kinda doubles as an essay-marking timer (my uni allocates a half hour per essay to markers).
This one is for downbeat, repetitive tasks where I need to tell my brain we’re going to be low-key bored for a while, so it’s time to settle in.
Settle in for calm focus (not repetitive)
I use a Spotify playlist of low-fi chill-hop about five hundred songs long. I have steadily removed most of the tracks in this list that include human speech or voices – I find these distracting.
I usually use this one for reading and discovering literature. The songs never repeat while I’m listening, so I get the subconscious feeling of work stretching as long as I want to.
Previous Rotations
Focus@Will
Best. Focus. Music. Ever.
Focus@Will has a whole sales pitch about the scientific way they help people focus. I can’t speak to the validity of that research, but as a data point of one, I found their music great background music for work.
Personally, I found it so helpful to have music that could suit my mood, chosen from a big library, where tracks were ongoing and all the mixing is perfect so you get the feeling of one ongoing sound experience. They have a huge range of songs and sounds, but playlists I preferred were Alpha Chill, Uptempo, Focus Spa, Drums n Hums and some of the instrumental stuff.
Coffeetivity
Recordings of café sounds. I’m sure you could find this in a bunch of noise generators, but I liked Coffeetivity the most because the recordings were long so they didn’t repeat. Sudden loud clangs and yells of ‘Order Up’ were in the mix, but they were incorporated well so they didn’t hurt my ears.
Rainy Mood
Website with rain sounds. Also has a song of the day. It’s great.
Apps
There are plenty of white noise generators that you can install and use offline. I had one on my MacBook Pro called White Noise Lite. You could set up soundscapes that allowed you to combine a bunch of sounds and save them like playlists. You could also mess with the parameters, e.g. playing the beach sound with the wave sounds up loud and the seagulls are turned low. I really liked this soundscape I made (approximating based on my memory from ~5 years ago):
- Storm sounds (high thunder, low wind)
- Rain on tent
- Rain on tin roof
- Forest sounds (high frogs, high creek, low birds)
Zero Highlight 