5 Websites with Sounds to Improve Your Focus

Struggling to concentrate? Discover how the sounds of a café or rain can help your attention span—and where to find them

While some people find it difficult to focus on tasks with external stimuli—like noise—drawing their attention, others find that music or even the background noise of TV or a podcast can help them concentrate.

If you're someone who wants to have more control over their sound environment, there's are loads of sound-generating sites and apps that lots of creative professionals use to improve their productivity.

Read on as we share five great websites with sounds for concentration and explain the science behind them.

White noise: giving your brain a rest

White noise is a constant sound emitted uniformly in its audible frequencies. It presents a consistent stimulus in which no frequency stands out over another.

White noise can be helpful for people who are sensitive to frequency changes and immediately detect any disturbance in the environment. For example, they might be woken up in the night by the noise of a neighbor's keys jangling or are able to detect the slightest movement around them while they're still asleep.

When you activate white noise, it creates a masking effect that can block out the sudden changes that can disrupt concentration or focus. Operating on a cognitive level, our brain gets "hooked" to a constant in the environment and stops paying attention to other sounds generated around us.

Examples of white noise: noises from machinery such as the constant sound of a fan or an air conditioning unit; an out-of-tune screen; regular rain (without thunder or intensity variations). In general, sounds of nature.

Pink noise and the sound palette

If white noise has the same power at all frequencies, pink noise provides a higher intensity at the lower ends of the sound spectrum, i.e., low frequencies. This could be useful for people who suffer from tinnitus or find the upper registers of white noise unpleasant for sensitivity reasons.

The many colors of sound don't end there. Depending on the frequencies—whether they go up or down—there's brown noise (also called red noise) that has higher intensity at lower frequencies. And, at the other end of the sound spectrum, there's violet noise. The range of colors is wide, however, not all the colors are related to concentration, but other brain and bodily functions.

Examples of pink noise: a steady heartbeat; steady rain; wind.

Environmental noise

For many people, managing the surrounding sound can have a psychological impact rather than cognitive. We can be susceptible to sounds that create a setting beyond our auditory frequencies that we relate to pleasurable situations. For example, people might enjoy listening to the sounds of the sea, the rain, or a thunderstorm.

These sounds could be from nature—such as the sounds of birds, waterfalls, or rustling treetops moved by the wind. However, they could also be social—bars, airports, airplanes taking off, or background chatter with sounds of objects being moved.

Websites with sounds to help you concentrate

Creatives that swear by sound management explain that—once you've identified what works for you and you know where to find it—it means that wherever you are working, you can always maintain your focus. It can be a useful tool to reduce the anxiety that comes from knowing that your performance can be affected by your setting.

Check out five websites for sound below and see what works for you.

Simply Noise: create your palette

Free, with in-app purchases

A straightforward website and app where you can listen to three colors of noise: white, pink, and brown. You can adjust the intensity of each one to find the frequencies you like best and create your personal color. It's a useful site to explore your own color palette and hear, in the words of its creators, "what your mind has been missing."

Coffitivity: working in a coffee house

Free

This website has gained popularity over the last couple of years, a time when millions of people have started working from home rather than in coffee shops.

Coffitivity recreates the ambient, feel-good sounds of a café in the afternoon. The secret to the success of this site is that each sound is tested and evaluated by thousands of people who decide what stays on the website and what goes.

Ambient Chaos: an eccentric menu

Free with in-platform purchases

Ambient Chaos is part of the Neal.fun website, the creative project of coder Neal Agarwal, which includes sounds he enjoys listening to. Here you will find classics, such as waves, forest, and rain, as well as more unusual sounds such as the crackling of a campfire to the buzzing of bees to an alien ship.

A Soft Murmur: create your setting

Free

A Soft Murmur is a website that provides you with pieces of a sound puzzle and suggestions for creating your ideal setting. The pieces include crowdpleasers like waves, thunder, wind, fire, birds, and other elements to customize your own mix by choosing the volume levels you prefer.

Noisli: choose your combo

Free with sign-up

If you don't want to spend time thinking about or designing your sound environment, Noisli offers ready-made combos that include options for productivity, sleep, relaxation, noise blocker, creative thinking, and more. You'll need to subscribe, but then the sounds are free.

Are you interested in exploring more ways to improve your concentration and productivity? Sign up for the course, Personal Productivity: How to Achieve Your Creative Goals, by Creative Performance and Leadership Coach Jeff Fajans.

English version by @acesarato.

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