Educators Get New Spot for Second Life Initiation

I sometimes think that people who can read and write while listening to music must not be musicians. If the background music is any good, that is, the musician can’t help but allow it to come to the foreground and thus pay more attention to it at the expense of focus on the reading and writing.

That’s certainly the case for me. I have to have absolute quiet or close to it if I’m engaged in serious reading and writing; conversely, I really get bent out of shape if someone wants to carry on a conversation while there’s a good piece of music playing.

Another factor may be the role that music itself played in your childhood. I grew up in a household where no one ever played/listened to music. The radio existed for hearing the winter storm warnings and school closures, and that’s it.  The only places I heard music were in the background, in stores, elevators, and the like. So to me, music, and especially music without lyrics, is always something in the background and it takes enormous mental effort to keep it in the foreground of my mind even when I’m at a live symphony concert. So I have no trouble completely ignoring music without lyrics, although if it has lyrics, I have a tendency to start paying attention to the words and analyzing the “text”.

Well, I am not any sort of musician, I still find noise of any sort (TV, music etc) very distracting if I am trying to study, write or read (either for work or a novel or a novel for pleasure).  That said, if I am doing anything active (working in the lab, cooking, dishes etc), I need some background radio or music to function well. 

I don’t know what that says about my  thought processes…..

I am a professor of music in a University.  For me, there is almost a sinisthetic thing that happens to me when listening to music:  I see it.   So for me to write while music is playing……  well,  as you can imagine,  it’s almost impossible. 

Back when I was working as a translator, I found that I couldn’t listen to music with lyrics in the wrong language. E.g., if I was translating from French to Swedish, I could listen to music in French or Swedish, but not to anything in English, or it would affect my work negatively. Purely instrumental music was never a problem. I usually worked best while listening to music in whatever language I was the least fluent in, rather than in my native language.

I’ve never thought about a connection between aural learning and my not being able to listen to music while I write or read. I do tend to read aloud sections that I’m having trouble with while I write. But learning styles must be more complicated than that because sometimes words go over my head while someone is talking and I have to “do” what that person is trying to explain, kinetic learning, right? Anyway, now I know not to be proud, or ashamed, of my listening preferences….

Great post.
I’m in the slightly odd camp of loving to have music on while I write, but feeling unable to concentrate if it’s on when I’m trying to read. I feel like the music frees me up when I’m writing, somehow. But when I’m reading, the “story” of the music interferes with whatever story I’m reading.
I grew up in a house that was always full of music during the day – often when I was writing or drawing – but at night, when everyone was reading, it was quiet.

I fall into the aural category; I remember my mother insisting, “Sound it out!” I write with, or without music; often I forget to put something on. But if I do, it must be instrumental, preferably classical: Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi. 

 I’m not sure that being a musician has much to do with it. I played the flute for nearly 10 years, but as Carol mentioned, I was a visual learner, doing well with sheet music and not as well with improvisation. I can work with music playing or not, but having it on usually helps me to focus more on the editing work at hand. By having music I already know and have heard playing, it turns into a sort of white noise. Without it, I get too distracted by office noise and surrounding conversations.

I think background might have something to do with it as well. As one of five children, my house was always loud, and there was generally a TV or radio on somewhere. Learning to tune that out was necessary to get any homework done!

 I’m an arts journalist who writes about music and musicians almost exclusively.  Synaesthesia aside, I cannot write about music when I am hearing music, least of all the music I am writing about. But that’s just me.

@chronicle-391f528ecacd74c4d9aeee407b394d57:disqus : I’m very much the same way about the type of music. Even Mozart (though I adore it) is so intricate as to be distracting. I can handle medieval chant, or sometimes the drone-y nonsense syllables of Sigur Ros, but otherwise it must be instrumental and simple. Often silence is the best choice.

For whatever it’s worth, I write a lot of dialogue (dramatic scripts and fiction), and that may use a different part of the brain than, say, expository nonfiction does. I’m certainly aware of needing to hear the rhythm of what I write. And I’m a musician (voice, guitar, piano, composition) too. Has anyone looked into whether those distracted by music are composers as opposed to performers? That is, is there a difference in the degree or type of creativity with which they habitually engage with music?

And did the one son become aural and the other visual because of training, or did an inherent propensity (to put it very broadly and not too biologically) direct each one way or the other?  Similar questions could be asked about language learning.  We know languages are best learned young–my multilingual cousins grew up in a blilingual household and first learned French and English by ear.  My household was monolingual (except when my grandfather visited and he and my dad spoke Dutch when they didn’t want my brorther and I to know what they were talking about).  I (sort of) learned Latin, French, and German by translating words on the page and can translate far better visually than aurally–in fact, I can’t really translate by ear at all since I’m always trying to translate what I hear into something I can see, at least in my mind’s eye.  It would be interesting to find out if these two boys show significant differences in brain activity patterns when they each listen to music or read words from a page.  

And for a related, if somewhat different take on music and the brain see Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophila. 

I can work with music, but it has to be the right kind of music: something instrumental or, if choral or vocal, with text I don’t know in a language I don’t speak (otherwise my language brain will pay too much attention to words heard and too little to words seen); something I know either very, very well (so that I can sing along without thinking) or not at all (so I have no urge to sing along at all); and something that doesn’t irritate me (commercial pop radio need not apply). At the office, I generally work in silence: earbuds are considered antisocial for management types, and any music played in my office will by heard by half a dozen other people who may not appreciate it.

I think I’m by nature an aural learner. As a toddler, I learned to sing entire Gilbert & Sullivan operettas by listening to them on records (yes, my family is almost impossibly geeky; why do you ask?); I was almost seven by the time I learned to read; I hear the words in my head as I read, and my brain assigns different voices to different characters. But I did learn to read music eventually (I was about 11, I think), and I wouldn’t want to go back: sure, you can learn a piece of music by ear after a couple of hearings, but if you can read music, you can sing it (or play it) without ever having heard it at all.

In my family’s flat, the computer and the TV are both in the living room; I can work well when the hockey game is on, but not so well when someone’s watching something with a plot. I have no idea what that means…

And to follow up on my earlier comment, has anyone done any fMRI research on brain activity patterns when someone is writing and listening to music–and writing differents sorts of things and listening to different sorts of music–at the same time?  It would be interesting to know if there is a general conflict between focusing on both activities at the same time–as there may be between texting/phoning on the one hand and driving on the other–or whether this varies from person (and, again, if it does, whether this is in some way inborn or primarily learned).  Prehistoric humans–at least since, say, 10K+/- years ago–presumably had much the same mental capacities as we do.  Is there evidence of capabilities for multitasking comparable to composing and listening, texting and driving–a tough quesion to answer, obviously, although mammalian evolution suggests the answer would  be positive.

Maybe this is relevant to the division between aural and visual: I almost always have my iTunes running in the background, or Pandora during the summer when there is enough campus bandwidth available, but I am totally distracted by television or anything with a visual emphasis. I have colleagues doing work during events like graduation, but I can’t even focus long enough to do simple reading.