Do you whistle while you work?

One of the perks of working from home is having more control over your work environment. Sure, there may be other people sharing your space, and the next-door neighbour’s barking dog might be a bother from time to time, but for the most part, you are the master of your work space. Want to work in a semi-dark room? Sure! Want to spread your research out and cover every last surface? Why not?! Need to spend your mornings sifting through emails with Jian Ghomeshi’s soothing voice on Q as background noise? Or maybe it’s old jazz standards, or hip-hop, or folk that you need to get down to business.

It’s this last element that C. Hope Clark looks at in a post for Women on Writing, entitled “The Music vs. The Muse.” Suspecting that, like herself, most writers prefer to work in silence, Clark conducted a casual poll of her blog’s readers and combined those results with a similarly unscientific survey by author Nathan Bransford. Both asked: do you listen to music while your write? If so, what?

The results?

• One third of respondents preferred no music, but this didn’t mean silence, necessarily. Many writers noted that, to maintain their concentration, they need some sort of white noise, which they get by opening a window to hear the sounds of nature (or their neighbours’ lawn mowers) or working in a coffee shop. Others purposely create white noise by switching on a fan.




• Of those who responded to Clark’s survey, 63 per cent listened to music, and a third of those listened to instrumental music only, which makes sense, if you’ve ever tried to transcribe an interview while blocking out a conversation happening near your desk. It’s nearly impossible to block out some words while listening intently to others. One workaround Clark mentions is to listen to music with lyrics in a language you don’t know, so the vocals become, in a way, just another instrument.




• Clark also reports that 90 per cent (!) of the writers who listened to music preferred classical music at least some of the time, noting that 60 bpm, which is the tempo of a lot of Baroque music, has been found to be optimal for kicking the brain into high gear. Another popular (mostly) instrumental music genre amongst the respondents was movie soundtracks. Think about motoring though a difficult passage while listening to the Rocky theme.




• Another popular response from those who preferred silence while writing was listening to music before writing to put them in the right mood, to prime them to work, and to put them in the same mindset that they were in when they left off the day before.




• Age matters, Clark discovered. After noting that her own preference has shifted from musical accompaniment while writing to complete silence, she looked back over the responses she got and found that older writers were much more likely to prefer a quiet work environment. She attributes this, in part, to today’s younger writers having had access to music wherever and whenever they want, on account of portable listening devices like iPods. For them, music is not something that needs to be actively listened to or sought out, she suggests—it’s a given.




• Last, Clark’s survey found that the type and difficulty of the writing task determines whether music is helpful or a distraction. Some said they could only write fiction with music and non-fiction without; other said the opposite. But a common element in many responses was that the harder the writing task at hand, the less likely the writer was to turn on some tunes.

How about you? Do you listen to music while you’re writing? What kind? Or, if not, do you prefer silence or a healthy dose of white noise? Do your listening habits change depending on what task you’re doing, such as when you switch from writing to editing? Have your habits changes over the course of your career? Share your thoughts below.

Thanks to Luigi Benetton for bringing Clark’s post to our attention.