Oh, I know that productivity definitely doesn't go down when I turn Winamp off. But now we have to consider just how great a benefit these sound schemes could provide, which I tried to allude to in the last sentence of my original post. Productivity be damned, I'm a musician and an avid music lover. I consciously sacrifice some productivity in order to enjoy music while I work. That takes the discussion into the realm of personal preferences and psychology, (for instance, while I know productivity is higher, I find myself generally less comfortable in my working environment if music is not present) so I'll not pull things too far that way on this list. The research certainly is intriguing and worthwhile, and users possibly playing music in the background shouldn't slow it up at all. It's just something I instantly thought of when I started reading this, since it's something I'd have to confront if ever presented with an idea like this. I thought it deserved a place on the table. Before I go...
"You might be interested in knowing that some research shows that while music may not redirect attention dramatically, listening to spoken words such as commercials and especially talk shows on the radio does interfere with human attention." NO radio for me. It's all off my hard drive, hence there're no commercials. I haven't researched this topic very thoroughly, I admit, but your info implies that this would not be as distracting, since it's all music and music the user is probably familiar with at that. Just thought it should be clarified, since I don't think this is uncommon, what with people's personal media libraries able to all fit on the tiniest of storage devices now.
JW Matthew2007 wrote:
Interesting you mention computing when music is playing. I can't stand doing this as I cannot focus while my attention is constantly redirected from the task at hand to each different song on the radio. You might be interested in knowing that some research shows that while music may not redirect attention dramatically, listening to spoken words such as commercials and especially talk shows on the radio does interfere with human attention.Regarding your comments on productivity, you might find it interesting to also run a little bit of a reversal design in that you might want to find a manner of assessing your productivity when listening to the radio for a month or so, then assess productivity for the following month without listening to the radio, then finally assessing productivity for the third month while listening to the radio. You might surprise yourself in that you might find you can focus much better as well as completing tasks much faster if you turn off the radio in order to not spread your pool of attention over multiple tasks rather than just a few tasks.Matthew----- Original Message ----- From: "Jared Wright" <wright.jaredm@xxxxxxxxx>To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 1:29 PM Subject: Re: Sonified Debugger vs. Screenreader QuestionJohn Greer wrote:Interesting you should put it like that, since that's been my overwhelming thought during the time I've been reading this thread. I don't know how the rest of you feel about other sounds in your computing environment, but I am rarely if ever working without"But Mat don't you want to program to Beethoven?"music playing. A variety of other factors in my computing environmentgenerate sound. One nice thing about the boring, droning speech synthesizers is that they do isolate themselves within a certain segment of my aural consciousness, allowing me to interpret what they're telling me without having to pick their cues out amongst from whatever my current soundscape might be. IN order for me to entertain the idea of using something that uses a lot of auxiliary "normal" sounds, I'd have to see more than a cursory potential spike in productivity.JW __________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind__________ NOD32 2682 (20071123) Information __________ This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. http://www.eset.com__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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