The Sound of Work

What your brain is doing
while you listen

Your office has a soundtrack. Maybe it’s the low murmur of conversation, the whir of the HVAC system, or the playlist you put on because eight hours of silence feels worse.

Whatever you’re hearing, your brain is paying attention. It doesn’t just receive sound; it sorts, predicts, and interprets it. Music is particularly good at engaging several of those systems at once.

Julie Potash, aka DJ Hesta Prynn, knows what sound can do. As a DJ, she uses music to shift energy. As a licensed clinical therapist and host of iHeartPodcast’s Music Is Therapy, she also examines why music affects us so deeply.

“Music has always felt like the place where I understand myself best,” Prynn says. Long before she could explain why, she knew that a song “could make me feel less alone or help me access something that I couldn’t articulate.”

There’s biology behind that. When we hear music, the brain tracks rhythm and patterns and predicts what might come next. When a song fulfills an expectation—or violates it in an interesting way—the brain registers the change. Pleasurable music also engages its reward system: research has found dopamine release in the striatum—a brain region involved in cognition, motivation, and motor planning—during peak emotional responses to music.

That helps explain why music can give us chills, bring us to tears, or transport us to a moment from 20 years ago. It connects sound with memory and emotion, creating unusually powerful associations.

“I have watched people enter a room guarded and self-conscious and, through music, become playful, expressive, and emotionally available,” Prynn says. “Music doesn’t necessarily create something new. Often, it gives us access to what was already there.”

Prynn’s therapy training gave her a way to understand what she had already seen on the dance floor. It also led her to a hypothesis: If a song can take you back, it can also help take you forward.

That idea applies to a workday as easily as a workout.

“We already use music to regulate our moods,” Prynn says. “You put on one song when you want to kill it at the gym, and another when you need to cry. The idea is to become intentional about it.”

Rather than asking whether music belongs in the workplace, ask a more useful question: What does your brain need to do right now?

Inspiration

When you’re trying to come up with something new, a little stimulation may help.

In a 2017 experiment, participants who listened to upbeat, high-arousal classical music performed better than people who worked in silence on a task measuring divergent thinking—the ability to generate multiple possibilities. 

But another study hypothesized that the music itself didn’t cause the arousal, meaning an increased sense of attentiveness and alertness. Instead, participants’ energy rose because they liked that specific type of music. If they hadn’t, the arousal wouldn’t have happened, and inspiration wouldn’t have come as easily.

The takeaway: to kickstart creative thinking, choose music that is personally energizing and meaningful. Or, as Prynn puts it, “a song that unlocks you.”

Flow

Music can create a sense of momentum, and rhythm may be part of the reason.

The brain doesn’t experience a beat as sound alone. Auditory and motor systems interact as we track musical timing, even when we aren’t physically moving. That may be why a beat can make an activity feel more fluid and make us want to tap, nod, or move along.

The social effect is even more interesting. Studies that measure several people’s brain activity at once during musical activities have found evidence of inter-brain synchronization, particularly across frontal, central, parietal, and temporal regions. 

That doesn’t mean a communal Spotify playlist will magically improve teamwork. Much of the research involves people actively making or coordinating with music. But it does suggest that shared rhythm can provide a common sense of timing—and that coordinated musical experiences can engage mechanisms associated with social connection.

At work, music may be useful around collaborative moments: an event, a creative workshop, a team ritual, or even the transition into a group session.

Prynn sees music as a way of connecting thought with physical and emotional experience.

“We all have things we want to believe about ourselves: I’m ready. I’m worthy. I can do this,” she explains. “But simply saying those words doesn’t always make us feel them. Music connects the thought to the body” and uses emotion and memory to help us get there.

Focus

For concentration, the answer is less straightforward.

Music can provide stimulation, mask distracting sound, and help some people settle into a task. But it can also become one more distraction for the brain to process.

Lyrics are a particular problem when the task itself involves language. In a randomized study of 102 participants, background music with lyrics significantly reduced concentration and attention compared with music without lyrics. A more recent study found similar results: that lyrics hindered verbal memory and reading comprehension, while instrumental music did not.

Yet instrumental music isn’t automatically better for everyone. Researchers found that how much people liked or disliked the music affected attention more than the type of music itself. 

So for focus, the best sound may be familiar, unobtrusive, and lyric-free—or it may be silence. The important variable is control.

“If you’re dragging yourself through an afternoon at work, the answer might not be another coffee,” Prynn says. “It could be putting on a tune that gives you a jolt of energy or choosing a louder and more active area in the office.” Before a presentation, she might step into a quiet room to hear her thoughts or put on her hype song.

Sound is not a static backdrop like the paint on the walls. 

Conversation, ringing phones, and ambient noise all compete for the brain’s attention. No single sonic environment works equally well.

The goal, then, isn’t an office that is perfectly quiet or constantly filled with music. It’s an environment where people can choose the sound that suits the work at hand.

Acoustic zoning can separate collaborative areas from spaces designed for concentration. Quiet rooms can offer an escape from ambient noise. Headphones can put the soundtrack back in an individual’s hands. 

With these options, music can become one more tool for deliberately shifting from one state to another.

The brain is listening either way.

The question is how much control we have over what it hears.