Focus sounds
Background sound for working, chosen on one criterion: it must be uninteresting. Anything with words, melody or a beat competes for the attention you were trying to protect, which is why every layer here is textural.
Speech is the distraction worth engineering against
Of everything that might be going on in an office or a flat, one category is disproportionately disruptive to concentrated work, and it is background speech. This is a robust and repeatedly replicated finding in cognitive psychology, usually studied as the irrelevant speech effect: performance on tasks involving order and short-term memory drops in the presence of speech you are not attending to, and it drops whether or not the speech is in a language you understand. Meaningless syllables do it too. Steady non-speech noise at the same level does it much less.
That has a direct engineering consequence. The aim is not to make the room quiet, it is to make speech unintelligible — and intelligibility depends mostly on the 500 Hz to 4 kHz band where consonants live. Broadband noise with real energy there does the job at a much lower level than you would need to simply drown a conversation out. This is precisely what sound masking systems in open-plan offices do, and they are usually set only slightly above the ambient floor.
Pink noise and rain both cover that band well, which is why they are the preset here. Brown noise does not: its energy is below the range where speech is decoded, so it will mask a lift shaft and leave the conversation next door perfectly intelligible.
Whether noise helps you concentrate is genuinely personal
The research on background noise and cognitive performance does not converge on a single answer, and anybody presenting it as settled is overselling. Moderate ambient noise has been reported to help on some creative and divergent tasks and to hurt on reading comprehension and complex reasoning. Individual differences are large and consistent: people who score as more introverted tend to perform worse under noise than people who score as more extraverted, on the same task at the same level.
A speculative mechanism circulates — stochastic resonance, in which a moderate amount of noise raises a weak signal over a detection threshold — and it is a real effect in physical systems. Applying it to attention in the human brain is an analogy rather than a finding, and it does not carry the weight often placed on it.
The workable approach is empirical and takes a week. Try a steady layer at low volume for a few sessions and see whether your work goes better or worse. If you find yourself listening to it, it is too loud or too eventful; drop the level, or drop the fire and ocean layers, which have the most going on. And if silence works better for you, that is a common and perfectly respectable answer.
Which layers actually cover conversation
Worked out from each layer's filter chain rather than from opinion: a layer covers speech if any voice passes energy between 500 Hz and 4 kHz, which is where the consonants that carry intelligibility live.
| Layer | As a speech masker |
|---|---|
| Rain | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
| Ocean waves | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
| Wind | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
| Fireplace | Poor — its crackles pull attention rather than covering it |
| White noise | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
| Pink noise | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
| Brown noise | Good — energy across the range where speech is decoded |
This is why brown noise disappoints against a talkative neighbour and works well against traffic.
Common questions
What is the best noise for concentration?
Something steady with energy in the speech range, which in practice means pink noise or rain. The specific choice matters much less than keeping the level low and the content uneventful.
Is music better than noise for working?
It depends on the task and on the music. Lyrics are the reliable problem, since they engage the same processing as the speech you are trying to ignore. Instrumental music is safer, and textural noise is safer still because there is nothing to follow.
How loud should background noise be for work?
Just above the level of what you want to cover, and no higher. Office masking systems typically sit only slightly above the ambient floor. If you can still notice the sound after five minutes, turn it down.