A little while ago, myself, my partner, and a friend of mine were in a café studying. We all had our respective headphones in listening to whatever we felt would get us through our studies. During a small break, my partner turned his computer around to reveal that he had been listening to a little video on YouTube called “Haunted Crypt Sounds | Dark Ambient.” I took a listen for myself and was horrified at the strange white noise echoing down what felt like long, haunted hallways with random water drips periodically falling. It was creepy and bizarre. Most likely it was a joke on his part, but it started me down a YouTube rabbit hole into strange ambience videos, then down another rabbit hole of study playlists. I was fascinated by the great variety of background study noise, both online and even simply in discussion with my friends.
There are many different kinds of sounds one can use to make studying feel a little less tiring. I personally like music: it feels like a little fun treat in between the thousands and thousands of words and pages. Especially when writing an essay I do not feel particularly attached to, I find music helps me get in an excitable mood. Making a specific study playlist is something that another friend had turned me onto. I find that songs with a certain pace and emotion can lend themselves to more productive study sessions.
This is the principle a lot of the study playlists you see on YouTube operate on. The title will typically be something abstract but playing into a very specific sort of feeling or emotion. Playlists like “be a jellyfish | playlist to feel like a jellyfish” or “nothing feels real (a playlist)” attempt to capture a specific feeling that can take you out of your regular mindset and allow you to get into the motion of studying. The videos also tend to be long, which allows for long, uninterrupted streams of consciousness that can help you get into a groove of working.
These playlists often draw on certain aesthetics in order to romanticize studying and even entire majors. Coursework is important for completing your major, but oftentimes the kind of work you do in school is not the kind of work you will be doing beyond university. Romanticizing the sometimes benign gruntwork that must be done in order to get to the really interesting stuff can be helpful to get through it. If you are interested in marine or even invertebrate biology, the jellyfish playlist may fit in with your perception of the work you want to do in the future. In previous years there has been an explosion of ‘dark academia’ moodboards and playlists alike, these most certainly serve the purpose of romanticization.
This skill of imagination is one we all have naturally, and one that may have even sparked our original desires to pursue a certain field of study. Connecting the daydreams we have about who we could be in the future to music and ambience can help continue those feelings during difficult or boring study periods.
Ambience can also be very relaxing during stressful times. Seeing work pile up on your to-do list can be quite daunting, so putting on some rain sounds or white noise can be really helpful to stay calm and take one thing at a time. Many people enjoy listening to this type of ambiance while they sleep.
Speaking of sleep, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) content is another background study noise method. For those who want to be super relaxed, ASMR provides a great background sound. I personally find that when music becomes too distracting or when music starts to make me zone out rather than focus, I switch to ASMR to hear pleasant but sort of meaningless sounds. In recent years ‘wood soup’ videos have been a popular background sound for many studious fellows.
There are many different ways to get yourself along long nights studying or catching up on readings. If you ask any person you know, you will find an extremely different set of answers and ideas. Whenever your previous method stops working, you can always switch it up until you find what works for you. Sometimes university work can feel useless and boring, but there is always a greater picture to look forward to, and a time will come when the work you are doing will feel good to you. In the meantime — as with any task that feels heavy — cope with what you can.
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