Goodbye Valentine - 131 bpm - Music to Study to

I was out walking in LA's San Fernando Valley and this image was arresting enough to make me blow my target pace - it was the 27th of February and my heart just broke.

I haven't touched the piano since the beginning of the year, I had promised myself I would publish God Knows before I started working on something new, so - this is the first session back.  I'm playing with an old theme, all 7's and 9's and very simple but kinda cool.

Visually I finally get to play with my LIFX bulb - I saw it on Kickstarter last year and thought it might be perfect.  I'm playing with a click at 131 bpm but the light is reacting to the piano in the room - it's not quite where it needs to be yet but I think it's encouraging.

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God Knows - Music to Create Flow

The original title was "Fuck Knows" but then that's not terribly commercial is it! ;-p

The  track was built for the animation - I recorded the core piano and video track in early November 2013 and sent it to SAmi to play with.  I don't know what his process is but the end result always looks amazing.

The funny thing is, nobody actually uses the visuals when they're working, but with YouTube as the primary music distribution channel, you've got to have something cool  for people to look at so that ultimately they might listen to you.

These visuals are from SAmi , they're synced to the music.  If you do chose to watch the video, they're pretty cool!

Thanks SAmi.

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Instrumental Music Better than Lyrics for Knowledge Workers

It's funny - we've been looking for this data for a while!

From our own personal experiences and just chatting with other people, we've always reckoned that for knowledge workers, a little bit of background music is good for productivity.  And to build on that, we believed that instrumental music was better than songs with lyrics as the words often got in the way of what we were trying to achieve.

This study from Taiwan in 2012 actually shows some data to back that theory up!

Over 100 participants in their early twenties were given concentration and attention testing within different audio environments.  Background music with lyrics had a significant negative effect on performance.

So, there you go kids - if you're a knowledge worker then instrumental music's the way to go - and hey - you might want t try some of ours ;-)

Image Credit: no kidding by andrea joseph - Flickr

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