Mozart effect
The Mozart effect began with a short letter in Nature in 1993. Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky reported that college students who had just listened to about ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448, did better on spatial reasoning tasks than after silence or a relaxation recording. […]
pink noise
Pink noise is a random signal whose power drops as frequency rises, by about 3 dB per octave, so each octave carries roughly the same energy. It sounds deeper and less harsh than white noise, closer to steady rain or a waterfall, and audio engineers use it to check whether speakers and rooms reproduce all […]
Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a time-management method developed by the Italian Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s, while he was a university student. It is named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used, pomodoro being Italian for tomato. In its classic form, work is divided into 25-minute blocks, each followed by a short break of […]
safe listening
Safe listening means enjoying music at levels and for durations that do not harm hearing. Hearing loss caused by loud sound is permanent and builds up gradually, and the World Health Organization estimates that more than a billion young adults are at risk of avoidable hearing loss from unsafe listening practices. Risk depends on both […]
sleep music
Sleep music is music chosen or composed to help people wind down and fall asleep: slow tempos, soft dynamics, few sudden changes and, often, no vocals. Lo-fi sleep playlists usually slow the beat further, thin out the drums and let warm pads, gentle piano and vinyl texture fill the space. The most thorough summary of […]
study music
Study music is any music people put on while reading, revising or working, chosen less for close listening than for a steady, pleasant atmosphere. Jazz lo-fi has become one of its best-known forms: mellow tempos, soft Rhodes chords, muted drums and, above all, few or no vocals. Research supports some of these choices but not […]
white noise
White noise is a random signal whose power is spread evenly across the whole frequency range, named by analogy with white light, which mixes all colours. To the ear it sounds like bright static, similar to an untuned radio. Apps and sound machines use it to mask traffic, voices and other intermittent sounds. The evidence […]
flow
Flow is the psychological term for deep, enjoyable absorption in an activity, when attention is so concentrated that self-consciousness fades and action seems to run by itself. The concept was introduced in the 1970s by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from interviews with artists, athletes, chess players and others about their best moments, and reached […]
irrelevant sound effect
The irrelevant sound effect is a well-replicated finding in cognitive psychology. People asked to memorise a sequence, such as digits or words shown on a screen, recall the order less accurately when sound plays in the background, even though they are told to ignore it. Speech is a particularly disruptive kind of sound, and studies […]
ASMR
ASMR, short for autonomous sensory meridian response, describes a tingling, static-like sensation that starts on the scalp and may spread down the neck and back, often with a feeling of calm. The name grew out of online communities rather than science, and a vast genre of videos now offers triggers such as whispering, tapping, crinkling, […]