So staring this summer I went back to school to earn my Masters degree, and as expected I’m spending the majority of my days studying. One thing I like to do when I’m just trying to focus hours on end, on a specific task, is listening to music in order to numb the dullness. But at this point, I have listened to each song in my playlist over hundreds of times and I really want to experience some new songs. So if any anyone could please make some recommendations about what songs you listen to while trying to FOCUS it would be much appreciated. I mostly listen to instrumental music; however, songs with lyrics are welcome!
Here is the new playlist I recently made to help me focus. It’s still a work in progress and for the moment I have put more “calming” songs into it, but I also listen to other types of music when I’m also doing similar task. For example.
I listen to a lot of music. Eight hours plus per day. It’s become clear to me that having access to a wide variety of music definitely makes the experience of working better than having a single playlist that you listen to again and again. I recommend that you subscribe to one of the streaming music services. The price isn’t too steep, and exploring and building up a library that way is a rewarding endeavour. I put this off for a long time, listening to local albums and “free” music on services like SoundCloud and YouTube, but it is hard to grow a diverse collection that way because as your library grows you need ways of organising and finding your music in one place. In your library you can save whole albums; when trying to concentrate it can be good to listen to lots of similarly themed music, and albums are often a natural division of that. It doesn’t matter if every song isn’t the best song ever, if it’s to help you focus. Or you can build up a custom playlists from those albums instead.
The service I use is Apple Music, which lets you add your own music files to a combined library made up of their songs and yours, which is great as there’s a lot of rarer music which is not available on any streaming service. Other services like Spotify didn’t have this feature last time I checked. It works on Windows and Android as well as Apple devices, and files can be saved offline too.
I could come up with a list of orchestral music, but where to start? I’ve been listening to the Elder Scrolls soundtracks (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim) today and they never get old. Those are notably absent from your playlist.
Funny, I was just about to make a post and mention that I’ve been listening to retro wave recently, in particular Dance With the Dead, and then noticed you actually linked to them. I only found out about them recently, but I really like their work. Other than them, I’ve also been listening to FM-84. The NieR soundtracks are also a personal favorite, it definitely has tracks that would fit your playlist.
I’m a student as well, and am always on the lookout for new music to hit the books to. Two artists I’ve been listening to a lot lately are Junya Nakano (Threads of Fate, Final Fantasy X) and Port Blue. Lots of ambient goodness with those two, which would fit the overall tone of your playlist. And as Draikin mentioned above, NieR Automata has been my gaming soundtrack of choice this summer.
The Elders Scrolls ost has been on my list of music to check out. Additionally, I have thought about enrolling in a music serves but I have been unsure of which one to use. I’ll check out Apples service. Thank you for the recommendations.
That is pretty funny, because I discovered Retro Wave only a few weeks backs. The NieR OST is defiantly great. On a side note, which NieR soundtrack do you like more? The original or Automata?
I really like these 2 artist that you mentioned. I’ve listened to a few more of there songs and I just love the atmosphere their songs give off. Thank you.
On a side note, you mentioned that Junya Nakano made songs for Final Fantasy 10, but I can’t find out which songs are composed my him.
Glad you enjoyed them! Here is a breakdown of Final Fantasy X’s score, track by track. My favorite of Junya Nakano’s contributions is “Phantoms”. I love the airy and dreamlike feel of his work.