Deep Focus Ambient Music: Our First YouTube Release

We make apps that help you focus. Turns out the thing most people actually need to focus is a bit of sound that drowns out the neighbour’s drill and the voice in your head reminding you about that email from 2019. So we made some.

Above the Noise is our first piece of deep focus ambient music, made in Ableton, and it’s now live on the Zen Magpie YouTube channel. Free to listen, no talking, no “smash that like button” halfway through. Just press play and get on with your life.

Watch Above the Noise on YouTube

What it sounds like

Slow, minimal ambient music built for long stretches of concentration. One warm home chord, with gentle shifts every few minutes that always find their way back. Nothing above a soft hum, nothing that jumps out at you. It’s the audio equivalent of a cabin with the fire on while the weather does its worst outside.

• No drops, no build-ups, no surprises
• Quiet and steady, so it sits in the background where it belongs
• 2 hours 22 minutes, long enough for a proper deep work session
• Best with headphones, fine on a laptop

Under the hood it’s all Ableton: sampled strings, a soft piano that comes and goes, a slow swell like breathing. The visual is a glass cabin on a cliff edge above a sea of drifting cloud, with the Milky Way overhead and the odd shooting star if you’re paying attention. You won’t be, though. You’ll be working. That’s the point.

What it’s for

Whatever you’re doing that needs your brain to stop wandering off. People will use it for all sorts, and that’s exactly how we want it:

• Deep work and coding - put it on, close the tabs, get one thing done
• Studying and revision - study music without lyrics fighting your notes
• ADHD focus and busy brains - steady background noise gives a restless mind something to hold onto
• Meditation and winding down - slow enough to breathe along to
• Painting, drawing and making things - a calm soundtrack for creative work, from sketchbooks to spreadsheets

Why does ambient music help you concentrate? Mostly because it doesn’t ask anything of you. Music with lyrics competes with the words in your head, and music that keeps changing keeps grabbing your attention. A slow, predictable soundscape masks the distracting noise around you without becoming a new distraction itself.

Pair it with a focus timer

Music sets the mood. A timer gets the work done. Open Pomomethod, our free Pomodoro timer, start a 25-minute sprint and let Above the Noise run underneath. The video is long enough for five full Pomodoros with breaks. If you’re wondering why 25 minutes, we’ve written up the science behind it.

More music is coming

This is the first, not the only. We’re going to keep making long-form focus music, study music and meditation music and putting it out on YouTube for anyone to use. Different moods, different places, same idea: calm sound for long stretches, no fuss.

If you want to know when the next one lands, subscribe to the channel. If Above the Noise helped you get something done, a like or a comment genuinely helps a small studio keep making these. We read them all.