A new study has shown that listening to black metal and heavy metal at work may be good for your productivity.
Studies have shown that music without lyrics is best for productivity, as hearing clean-sung words will distract you from the task at hand, and this is something that death metal and black metal songs usually don’t have.
A study has shown that listening to black metal and heavy metal could increase productivity at work, in particular for those working in software and coding.
According to a study by Stack Overflow, black and death metal are popular genres among those working in software and coding, and, apparently, the music could be improving their productivity. 3.2% of the 90,000 software developers surveyed said that metal was their go-to music. A pretty massive number of people when applied to the estimated 26 million people working in coding worldwide.
In a conversation with Atlassian, Rob Whitlock, a Stanford-educated developer at Pandora, says that “what appeals to me about death metal when I’m coding, believe it or not… [is that] When I hear clean singing, my brain starts tracking what they’re saying and it’s distracting. But with the vokills, it’s just a sound. You don’t think about what they’re saying so it just fades into the background.”
It’s been suggested that the vocals in death metal and black metal are processed by the brain as sounds instead of words, making both genres fit the bill for heightening productivity. However other genres of metal with clean-sung vocals are apparently too distracting while working.
