Ambient Music Software' title='Ambient Music Software' />Mixcraft 8 is the Musicians DAW music recording software for musicians, not engineers. Easy nohassle licensing of royalty free music to use your films, TV shows, youtube videos, DVDs and websites. Also a large collection of Free Royalty Free Music. The Best Sounds for Getting Work Done. The right kind of sound can relax your mind, hone your focus, drown out distractions, or get you pumped to kill your to do list. Gypcrete Installation Process. Weve assembled some research and free resources to help you create your own best workspace soundtrack. Blast from the past is a weekly feature at Lifehacker in which we revive old, but still relevant, posts for your reading and hacking pleasure. This week, were reviving a particularly old post listing some of the best music and sounds for productivity, as crowdsourced by the Lifehacker commentariat of 2. Does Music Really Make You More Productive The answer falls somewhere between Listening to Mozart makes you a genius and Just be quiet and work. The most often cited study into the question of musics effect on the mind involves the so called Mozart effect, which suggests that listening to certain kinds of musicAmadeus Wolfgangs classical works, in particularimpacts and boosts ones spatial temporal reasoning, or the ability to think out long term, more abstract solutions to logical problems that arise. The Mozart effect has been overblown and over promised, and even outright refuted as having bupkiss effect, but that doesnt mean a great mind juicing playlist cant be created. The Workplace Doctors site details both sides of the question. Atmospheric slowmotion boogie from German duo Software off their 1988 LP, Digital Dance. Edit six years later Excellent article about Software here. Happiness Frequency Serotonin, Dopamine and Endorphin Release Music, Binaural Beats Relaxing Music Duration 14258. Greenred Productions Relaxing. Meadowlands USA Chartreuse Champagne 2012 Music From Mainzer Strasse 2012 S The Sounds of Skyline Blvd. S CrossSectional Studies 2012 S. Atmosphere Deluxe is designed to help mask noise, promote relaxation or even to replace an entire collection of natural sound CDs. You can listen to the soundscapes. In one study, University of Illinois researchers found that listening to music in all types of work increased work output 6. In another study dissected at Meta. Filter, 5. 6 employees working on basic computer tasks were found to be more productive when there was no music playing over the same period tested with music. So the real answer turns out to be, unfortunately, it depends. It depends on whether your office or workspace is noisy enough that a good kind of noise or music is preferable to the natural cacophony. It depends on your personal attention span, and how likely you are to fiddle with controls versus letting a music stream trickle past your ears. Though many of the final answers to studies of music at work conflict, the general consensus seems to be that people can be boosted at work by music, if theyre willing to be. Ambient Music Software' title='Ambient Music Software' />If that sounds like you, heres a few suggestions on where to find music that others have found helpful in their own workspaces. The Classical Route. How it works The ornate instrumentation and composition of Baroque classical music gets a lot of attention for its possible mind boosting effects. Eight radiologists were asked to go about their day while listening to Baroque period tunes. They mostly self reported better mood and productivity, except for one worker who said the music had a negative effect on his concentration. Followers of Getting Things Done and productivity writer David Allen note in forum posts that the man himself seems to dig Vivaldis Four Seasons, Bachs Brandenburg Concerto 3, and other Baroque tunes as mood setters for tackling tasks like a weekly review. A key suggestion from a David Allen forum posterlook for tracks paced at about 6. Ambient Music Software' title='Ambient Music Software' />Its the beats per minute required to get the brain up to optimal revs. David has a segment about it on GTD Fast I also came across it at a speed reading class. It seems to cause a bright and breezy frame of mind where thinking and creativity are easier. I find it works. Where to get it Being often hundreds of years old and a niche interest these days, classical music is relatively easy to find online. Wikipedia has hundreds of freely licensed files, and public domain search sites like Musopen offers a lot of good stuff, too. Ambient Music Software' title='Ambient Music Software' />If the Baroque sound doesnt quite do it for you, Lifehacker commenter Catalyst suggests the Vitamin String Quartet, which covers pop tunes in string quartetchamber music style. Its not the same kind of down deep arrangement as traditional classical work, but the Quartets work takes away distracting lyrics and soothes out pop musics more annoying edges. Though its worth noting that unfamiliar music may be better than stuff you know. Music is a personal choice, but most of us cant really sort emails to Slayer or hit tightRead more Read. Heres a sample of the Vitamin String Quartet The AmbientElectronic Route. How it works The label ambient has been applied far too broadly to be of much help to anyone but record store owners. Still, at its core, all ambient music is designed not to jump in your face, but still keep your brain engaged at a lower, subconscious level. Pioneers like Brian Eno developed ambient music as an experiment in composition, allowing algorithms, randomness, synthesizers, and whatever sounded neat to replace the standard components of pop music. A modern variant, chillout, and its categorical cousins downtempo, ambient house, and certain varieties of IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, grew out of a need for dancers and partiers at techno clubs to take a break, relax, and recover from their efforts, along with whatever else they needed recovering from. Like the original ambient music, much of it is designed to relax the mind and allow it to roam, while providing just enough stimulation to register as inspiration. Where to get it Both Gina and Brian Ashcraft at our gaming focused sibling blog Kotaku find Enos Music for Airports to be superior music for deep tasks and serious studying. It was designed, after all, for actual airports, to put passengers at ease in an often stressful situation, right before getting on a tube that some consider their worst fear. Your upstairs neighbors sound like theyre rearranging the furniture and your roommatesRead more Read. Gina and many, many commenters dig the Groove Salad stream and other stations, like Drone Zone and Secret Agent, provided by Soma. Half as many recommend the ambient offerings at Digitally Imported, and often flip between it and Soma. Both sites provide free audio to most any music player that can tune in web playlists or radio. Just in time for finals week, the Hack. College blog recommends studying to a continuous ambientRead more Read. If youre a fan of streaming recommendation site Pandora, or like the minimalist, glitch, or seriously ambient side of techno, commenter maczter recommends a playlist created by a Pandora employee, Ovals, that he describes as minimalist elemental glitch. I tried it out for an afternoon writing session, and found five out of six tracks to be unexpectedly calming and helpful in the taskwith the exception of one rather jarring, high pitched interloper. The Noise Route. How it works If music is too distracting for your tastes, but your chatty co workers, office machinery, and general clamor are even more distracting, colored noise might be a worthy addition to your audio repertoire. Noise generators, usually grouped into groups of white, pink, or brownred, cover a range of your ears audible spectrum with generic sound to mask or lessen the distractions of other sounds. Wikipedias entry on sound masking puts it best Imagine a dark room where someone is turning a flashlight on and off. The light is very obvious and distracting. Now imagine that the room lights are turned on. The flashlight is still being turned on and off, but is no longer noticeable because it has been masked. Sound masking is a similar process of covering a distracting sound with a more soothing or less intrusive sound.