Music selections please.

glondor

My 10 year old daughter is going to be allowed to listen to her mp3 player in classes this coming school year. They will allow it as a "sonic mask" to help her to not get distracted quite so easily. The requirements for sound are either white noise, music with no vocals, (ie. classical) or something that will not BE a distraction. Any ideas? thanks.

zoobyshoe

Hayden is mildly pleasant and more or less innocuous. He wrote a great deal of his stuff to be played in the background as people chatted at soiree's, so much of it is intended to be a non-distracting background sound.

chroot

A lot of ambient or atmospheric electronic music qualifies. It can be a little tough to find entire albums without any vocals at all, though. It also has the advantage of having far less dramatic changes in volume than most classical music.

- Warren

Math Is Hard

I hope that helps her. I sympathize. I wear headphones at work everyday because little noises make me insane - and two of my coworkers have picked up the habit of cracking sunflower seeds (shell on) while they work.

There's some new age jazz that might fit the bill. I am a fan of a composer named Jean Michel Jarre, and I started listening to his music when I was about 14 or 15. His songs are mostly pure instrumental works. I don't know if she would like that style or not, but just an idea.

moe darklight

I don't know if any 10 year old would enjoy these much, but these are some that work for me, she might be into it:

"Boards Of Canada" make good music to work to. It's very spacey electronic music.

"The Desert Sessions 1 & 2" are also great. It's out of print, but there are ways of getting it on MP3.

Pink Floyd "wish you were here" and "meddle" have vocals, but they're not distracting, and it's nice and mellow.

Kid-A from radiohead (if you take out "the national anthem," which might be too intense for working) is also great, it has vocals too, but also not distracting.

A band called "shadowy men on a shadowy planet" (they made the theme song for the tv show kids in the hall), they make really cool instrumental music.

chroot

Boards of Canada's songs mostly have "vocals." True, they're usually just sampled loops, but they're vocals.

- Warren

moe darklight

true. it's not distracting the way lyrics would be though, it's mostly short samples. which is why I put pink floyd and radiohead too; they have vocals technically, but they're not up-front and distracting, they just kind of float in the background.

zoobyshoe

They play radiohead all the time at the cafe where I go to draw and I would like to kill that band.

moe darklight

well, you and I are just never going to agree much on anything, are we

turbo

My suggestion would be to buy a CD set of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, and rip 'em to the mp3 player. The music is lively, with coherent themes and interesting patterns in pitch and timing.

berkeman

I'm partial to Vivaldi.

dontdisturbmycircles

Try Rachmaninoff. Or the Gladiator soundtrack , not sure that she would like it. There is a good website I used to know of that handed out free atmospheric music since the guy enjoyed making it... I want to say one of the albums was called something winter, it will come to me later in the day and I will remember to post the website here.

devil-fire

there is a lot of electronic music that doesn't have vocals. I'm partial to a DJ named Christopher Lawrence myself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o3SFp6ElP4

have you thought about music from different languages? you might be able to get the genre of music your daughter likes from another language so she still enjoys the sound of it but isn't distracted by words she recognizes.

edward

You might consider American Indian flute music. It is mellow and not disruptive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APp5eDgOs-I

Bamboo flute from India is very similar.

Your best bet will probably be to try a mix, but I have a feeling your daughter will eventually prefer and do better with a certain Genre. Most kids seem to.

glondor

WOW thanks for all the response. I will find some of these and preview them for her, and also get her input. Lots of good ideas. my daughter says thanks all.

glondor

Is there a source for the classical selections, It is public domain right? All the selections I can find are flac files. Will an mp3 player play a flac file??

chroot

http://www.classicalarchives.com/

Some portable players can play FLAC, but most cannot. You can use a wide variety of software to convert FLAC into mp3, though.

- Warren