If you’re like me, you listen to music non-stop while you’re working or studying. But some music works much better, right? Turns out there’s a science behind it, and Focus At Will has a streaming music service based on this neuroscience…
I think about 50% of the disk space on my laptop is consumed by music, actually, I have tons of music organized into a variety of playlists. Still, most commonly I listen to music by genre and the most common genre is movie soundtracks.
Movie soundtracks?
Turns out that they work really well because they’re generally up-tempo and rarely have lyrics. Lyrics, it seems, are far more distracting for your brain than just musical passages.
It was about 18mo ago at the Consumer Electronics Show that I bumped into Focus@Will, showing off its curated music streams designed for study and cognitive focus. Intrigued I gave it a whirl and was suitably impressed. My favorite channel? Jazz. No vocals, very similar tempo song to song. My high school daughter got hooked too, though she surprised me by picking classical for her studies.
Focus@Will recently released a major update to its interface with new channels and some interesting feedback mechanisms, so it seems like a good opportunity to circle back and see how it’s working.
First off, here’s what you see with a Focus@Will player:
Quite beautiful with its peaceful, attractive photos. Suitable for a second screen, for sure.
The most common thing I find myself doing with Focus at Will is switching genres. Here’s the current lineup:
I like the “energy level” slider, though given how I work, it’s just about always on “high”. Your experience may vary!
You’ll notice that “Jazz”, however, is missing. I asked the Focus at Will team and here’s what they explained:
“There was a jazz channel in our private beta test version. Although we had high hopes for it, it performed quite poorly in testing. We aren’t ruling out a more narrow windowed jazz station in the future, but we’ve got quite a few more other new ideas to bring to fruition before we would revisit jazz.”
Ah, okay. Sorry Charlie Parker. 🙂
One more feature I want to highlight in this simple but surprisingly useful subscription service: The timer button. It’s along the top, and if you just click it, the default is to run for 100 minutes until the music stops, but if you double click it, you can specify whatever duration you want:
This is quite useful if you need to really focus on something for an hour or some other set amount of time.
The science behind Focus at Will is available on its site, both in the How it Works section and the Science Primer section. The highlight:
“Developed this in partnership with leading neuroscientists Dr. Evian Gordon and Dr. Stephen Sideroff (UCLA Professor of Psychology). Trials show typical 12-15% positive increase in focus biomarker and up to 400% extended session time.”
Well that’s a no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want to be 15% more focused and increase your focused time up to 400%?
Learn more and sign up for their FREE trial, then you can decide whether you want to opt to a premium account for a mere $3.99/mo (That’s a whopping $0.13/day): Focus@Will music service.