There are hundreds of white noise apps on the App Store, but only some of them helped us focus on our writing. Here’s a bit of science behind the mechanism at work, and the best apps we found for putting it in practice.
Too restless for silence, I have long been on the hunt for the
perfect mood music for writing. So when I found myself using the new iOS
app Thunderspace more and more to help me focus and stay productive, I started wondering why it worked so well.
It's not that I was skeptical of Thunderspace at first--it's just
that I didn’t care how this gloried white-noise app worked under the
hood. Lots of people work with some sort of ambient noise, thinking it
makes them more productive. Thunderspace made me wonder if the theory
was actually proveable.
Researchers Ravi Mehta, Rui (Juliet) Zhu, and Amar Cheem--who don’t
make apps, but had the same question--tested the hypothesis, filling in
some big holes around sound research along the way.
Publishing "Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition," in the Journal of Consumer Research,
they did indeed find that a moderate level of ambient noise actually
does boost creativity for most people. So I redoubled my hunt for
ambient noise apps. Here’s what I found.
First, quality matters. The Thunderspace app comes courtesy of the same people who do the weather app Haze,
as well as the Emmy-award winning nature sound recordist, Gordon
Hempton. There are two factors that set it apart from other "rain
sounds," of which there are hundreds. First is that the storms were
recorded in stereoscopic 3-D, designed for headphones at an impressive
256kpbs AAC. Also, despite the high-quality sound, the app came in under
a 50mb download, a sign the developer was deliberate with the design
and resources.
For the rest of the story: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3015970/why-ambient-noise-makes-you-more-productive-and-three-apps-that-do-it-right
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