Boost Your Creativity With the Sound of a Coffee House

Creative professionals love working in coffee houses. Novelists, graphic designers, ad copy smiths, comic book illustrators and screen writers can be found clicking away on laptops in cafes all over the world.

The website WorkFrom.co provides a nearly exhaustive list of the best coffee shops, bars and other work-friendly places away from home and the office in 700 major cities worldwide. You can search for places nearby and find them on a map. You can choose to see only those that have food, free Wi-Fi, sufficient wall outlets, and so on, and you can read reviews about each location written by other creative professionals who rate each place specifically on whether or not it’s a good place to work.

We love working in these places and most of us aren’t even sure why. We just know that we do. Coffee house are generally more pleasant places to hang out than sterile office cubicles, of course, but creative professionals who work from home are drawn to them just as much as employees chomping at the bit to get out of the office.

In his terrific book, The Mental Game of Writing, James Scott Bell insists that it’s because, whether we realize it or not, background noise stimulants creativity.

“Research into the area of creativity and ‘white noise’ asserts that a moderate level of sound helps creative people in their work,” he writes. “What appears to happen is that more parts of the brain are pinged when there’s a bit of background noise going on than where there’s total silence. You are working consciously on one thing, with particular focus, while other parts of your brain below the conscious level are turning gears and yanking pulleys. And every now and then the foreman sends up an idea your consciousness grabs hold of.”

The research comes from a team at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. They found that roughly 70 decibels of sound, the amount in a typical café, is optimal, whereas louder sounds, such as a garbage disposal running, are annoying and disrupting.

Ravi Mehta led the research team. He makes Bell’s point in a different way. Total or relative silence boosts concentration, which is terrific if you’re working on the math problem from hell, but no so great if you’re doing something creative, which requires deep and broad thinking rather than a laser-sharp focus.

“This is why if you’re too focused on a problem and you’re not able to solve it,” he told the New York Times, “you leave it for some time and then come back to it and you get the solution.” Moderate levels of background noise “help you think outside the box.” he said.

We can’t all spend eight hours a day five days per week in a café. Well, we could, but we’d spend a small fortune and probably suffer debilitating insomnia. The good news is that we can get a creative boost from background noise at home or in the office for free.

If you’re a coffee shop junkie, check out the Coffitivity website. They’ll pipe perfectly mixed recordings from various cafes right into your speakers or ear buds. You can hear the sound of espresso machines, clanking dishes and background chatter without any clearly annunciated words to distract you. (There are no recordings of jerks gabbing away on their cell phones.) Choose from three different tracks: Morning Murmur, Lunchtime Lounge and University Undertones. If you upgrade to Premium, you’ll have access to three additional tracks: Paris Paradise, Brazil Bistro and Texas Teahouse.

If the sound of a humming public place isn’t your cup of tea (sorry, couldn’t resist), you can always go with the sounds of nature. The CalmSound website has all kinds of free tracks, including ocean sounds, thunderstorms, Antarctic wind and more. These tracks were designed for relaxation and meditation, but they work just as well in the background while working.

You can never go wrong with music, of course, but writers generally do better with classical music and movie soundtracks without distracting lyrics.

Go on. Pop in your ear buds and give some of these tracks a spin. You might be surprised at what happens.