Do Productivity Playlists Actually Work?.

Listening to music is a long-used productivity hack among creatives. Author Stephen King says he used to listen to Anthrax, Judas Priest, and Metallica while writing. Gabriel Marcía Márquez “wore out” Beatles records while working on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Charles Bukowski at least claimed he needed cigars, whiskey, and classical music to write 10 pages every day.

Millions of people similarly turn to music to focus. Playlists that claim to offer music to help people concentrate are growing in popularity. The YouTube channel Chillhop Music and a similar channel called ChilledCow have a combined 5.3 million subscribers. Chillhop’s 24-hour livestreams of playlists like “beats to study/relax to” attract many thousands of listeners at a time, while its Spotify playlists boast around 130,000 listeners every month. The channel’s “lo-fi hip-hop” playlists (lo-fi refers to low-fidelity music, which has an intentionally “unpolished or rough” sound) feature tracks with light music mixed with ambient noise.

But does listening to a highly curated playlist really help productivity?

For Maria A.G. Witek, a professor in the Department of Music at Birmingham University, there’s no easy answer. Witek recently co-authored a study on what type of music elicits a “pleasure response” among listeners. As she explains it, the effect of background music on concentration largely depends on a person’s personality and taste, but work-appropriate music tends to share a few general qualities.

The best kind of music to listen to while working should have no vocals, Witek says, because lyrics tend to be distracting. The music should also be slow, repetitive, and soft. Ambient, atmospheric sounds like rain, a waterfall, or rainforest noises block out distracting noises in the work environment — like passing cars or low-level chatter among colleagues — and can help refocus attention and concentration. “These characteristics will promote the right level of physiological and attentional arousal in listeners, acting as a stimulant without distracting from the task,” Witek says.

“High-arousal music often has more distinct events per unit of time than low-arousal music, potentially making it more distracting, because the listener is more focused on processing the music rather than the task at hand.”

Tram Nguyen, a member of the Cambridge Brain Sciences Team, recently found some evidence that low-tempo songs may benefit the regions of the brain responsible for memory and completing tasks. In a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Psychomusicology, Nguyen and a colleague asked people to listen to music they had previously rated as songs that altered their mood or “arousal state” in some way. The people in the study then listened to those songs while completing tasks that tested their ability to recall words and faces. The researchers found that low-arousal negative music — music with low tempos and minor chord melodies, which are usually associated with despondency and sadness — improved memory performance the most.

“High-arousal music often has more distinct events per unit of time than low-arousal music,” Nguyen says, “potentially making it more distracting, because the listener is more focused on processing the music rather than the task at hand.”

Nguyen used the example of Prelude in E Minor by Frédéric Chopin — a melancholy piece of piano music — as an example of low-arousal negative music. This criteria also applies to the ambient and lo-fi hip-hop songs that are so popular online, which often feature a girl softly crying, a steady rainfall, or a heavy base in the background. They can elicit a sort of calming, comfortable gloom.

Victor Szabo, an assistant professor of music at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia who is writing a book about the ambient music genre, explains that lo-fi and ambient music can make the listener feel secure, because this type of music often features looping or sustained sounds or tones that allow the brain to “easily predict on a subconscious level how it will continue to sound.”

“The listener can turn their attention away from the sound and toward other things without being surprised or thrown off,” Szabo says. Ambient music “has a sort of cocooning effect.”

Lo-fi hip-hop and jazz typically also contain consistent secondary background noises, like a tape hiss or a vinyl crackle. These sound effects create what Szabo calls “a texturally consistent sonic mulch, almost like white noise,” which, in addition to blocking out intrusive sounds, can even stimulate feelings of nostalgia and comfort for the listener.

Even so, playing music while working may not actually be as helpful as people want it to be. “A lot of research seems to suggest that it’s best not to use any background music when studying,” Witek says. “The argument is that music will always reduce the amount of available attentional space, taking attentional resources away from the task at hand.”

Nguyen’s research echoes Witek’s assertion that it’s best to work in silence. Her 2017 study found that the region of the brain that is used to focus on tasks gets taken up, at least in part, by processing background music. This means less of the brain’s energy is allocated toward getting work done when music is playing.

Yet people continue to listen to music while at work. Witek speculates that it’s simply more fun and therefore more motivating, “even if concentration may be jeopardized.” If people are in a good mood while working, their performance might also be better, she says.

“The kinds of music that work well for concentration and getting work done are the sorts of things that are interesting enough to notice, but not so interesting that they distract you from the thing you’re trying to do,” says Samuel Mehr, a Harvard researcher in the Department of Psychology who studies how the brain perceives music. It’s “aesthetically pleasing enough that it’s fine to listen to them for long periods of time, but not so aesthetically pleasing that you want to stop everything and just listen.”

That could be the reason why lo-fi and ambient-sound YouTube channels have amassed such huge followings. Chillhop provides boring background noise that is just distracting enough to make work seem, well, less like work. The slight groove elevates the mood, but it’s not funky enough to warrant dancing or daydreaming. Whether it actually promotes focus and productivity is still up for debate.