What are your Background Music when Reading a Book?
For example when I was reading The Lord of the Mysteries I was mostly listening to Tchaikovsky’s classical music and similar music. This was the playlist
Maybe some people can read a book and listen to music at the same time, but I’m not smart enough. The music bleeds into the book, and it becomes Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Pink Floyd, which is completely different from Treasure of the Sierra Madre, if you catch what I drop.
Has to be lyricless, so I’ve found a lot of success with LoFi Girl.
Yupyup, LoFi all the way. I like “Lofi Fruits” on Spotify.
I don’t like listening to background music while reading. I generally prefer silence or white noise. I’m working on an extremely limited attention budget, so adding more things to pay attention to is often a great way to get distracted from the book I’m reading.
Same, music while reading would just distract me. Or I would just block it out entirely and the music wouldn’t add anything.
None. Whenever I’m reading a book that I really like, I completely forget that the outside world even exists. It wouldn’t matter whether I’m playing music or not as I won’t hear any of it anyway.
My short attention span is bad so I listen to the audio book so I don’t get distracted
One year in college I decided to stay at school during one of the long weekend holidays. The dorm would be empty and I’d have the place to myself. Decided Saturday I was going to read The DaVinci Code since it had been sitting on my shelf all semester. I had also just gotten Christopher O’Reilly’s album True Love Waits, a piano instrumental compilation of Radiohead songs. So I popped the CD into my Walkman and walked up and down the empty dorm reading the book and listening.
A few years later I saw the movie and my biggest issue was that the music was all wrong. I already had a great soundtrack in my head.
Huh? Am I missing something? Why would you want to voluntarily place a live distraction while you’re reading a book?
Kind of like having background music in an action sequence of a movie, builds up hype or sets the tone of the book.
Usually something with no lyrics or lyrics in a language I can’t understand so I don’t mix up the words I’m reading with the ones I’m hearing.
I have a lot of success focusing on reading when it’s acoustic or classical music.
I can’t read if there is any noise in the background.
I need silence when reading.
Just what comes to mind. Es Posthumus and Two Steps From Hell don’t really have lyrics (or at least none my brain gets distracted by.)
I find Lazy Eye by The Silversun Pickups is very chill. Good “studying” music.
Beyond that, mostly music I’m very familiar with and listen to a lot. Music I know so well it doesn’t surprise me at all.
LoFi and synthwave are my normal go-to choices but I’ll also theme it around the style of book I’m reading, like tavern music for light fantasy or space movie soundtracks for sci-fi. Has to be mostly wordless though.
My poor attention span makes it difficult to enjoy longer reads, though I had a blast listening to Anamanaguchi’s Endless Fantasy while reading through Ready Player One. I feel like that album was made for that book.
I listen to music most of the day, even in class as a teacher. But I don’t listen to anything when I’m reading, it’s just a distraction for me.
