Recently I've been thinking about my music listening habits and how they've changed over time. One facet of listening that has shifted dramatically over the last several years has been my music listening at work, or more accurately my music listening while working.
Rewind ten years, and I was working on-site in an open plan office. You know the type, the ones that bosses love and workers hate. Zero privacy, loud, distracting, the exact opposite of a situation that facilitates someone trying to concentrate or being able to get anything done. I happened to be seated next to two ladies who seemed to spend most of their day talking loudly about personal matters, because apparently they had no actual work to occupy them. One of them *always* had Twitch open and seemed to be unable to function without having a stream playing on her second monitor. I digress, but it's shocking how much personal stuff people did on their work computers in that office. Really, you're going to log in to your Facebook, Insta, and other socials...at the office? You know IT just rolled out zScaler, right?
Anyway, this situation was the beginning of me using music as a way to cover up other distracting noises. It took some experimentation to figure out the kind of music that actually helped, because many genres just made things worse. Anything with lyrics was no good. Anything rhythmically complicated also proved too distracting. Most jazz was out. I love a good saxophone, but the moment brass starts playing, I'm not paying attention to anything else. Electronic music seemed to work pretty well. I'm sure the cliche of "lo-fi beats to study to" existed at the time, and this is pretty much what I ended up creating from my music collection as a playlist that could get me through the work day.
I also experimented with headphones quite a bit, trying to find something isolating enough to block out the distractions coming from the people around me. Out of all the options I tried, where I landed proved to be both highly effective and extremely silly. I used a pair of bluetooth (wireless) IEMs - think of an earbud that's more like an earplug that you'd wear to a concert. Over the top of those, I put a pair of studio headphones, which were effectively unplugged and were just used as a sound barrier. Totally stupid, right? At one point I was even contemplating wearing the big yellow cans that I wear to cut the sound while mowing the lawn. I can't believe I had to go to these lengths to create an environment that I could be semi-productive in.
The worst part of it is that I think this was damaging to my relationship with music. Rather than being a source of creativity, joy, and inspiration, it became a purely utilitarian filter. Honestly, noise fatigue became an issue. And after 8-10 hours of that, daily, I just wanted some peace and quiet in my non-work hours. I almost entirely stopped listening to music outside of work. It was a real bummer.
For me, one of the few upsides of the pandemic era was the onset of remote work, which completely solved this problem. Since my company had the foresight (I say this sarcastically) to close our local office after COVID was basically over, I continue as a remote worker to this day. Now I spend most of my workday on Zoom, but...music is no longer ruined for me. And, weirdly enough, listening to music has become more of a focus in of itself than it ever was before. To this day, I have a real hard time even tolerating background music when my attention is elsewhere. Mind you, this way of listening started off as an intentional habit, so I think it's more a matter of my ability to focus actually improving vs my tolerance for distraction dropping. That's what I tell myself, anyway.
~nullish
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