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Many professionals use music and sound in general to help them boost their energy levels, creative thinking and productivity as a whole. Most of us turn to the music of our choice -- for me it's usually a combination of a new album and old favorites. However, if you are working on tasks that require you to channel your creativity, you should be listening to ambient noise.

A recent Fast Company article noted research which found that moderate noise levels are actually best for harnessing creativity. Additionally, it is ambient noise, not music, that really helps us harness our creativity.

These moderate noise levels promotes abstract processes, which leads us to a higher level of creative thinking. The noise does this by making it difficult for us to process things in the way we usually would, which puts our creative processes in high gear. Higher levels of noise makes us feel overwhelmed and disallows us to efficiently process any information.

This impact of ambient noise on productivity is one of the many reasons why people enjoy working out of coffee shops -- the idle chatter around us gets our creative juices flowing. We've previously written about Coffitivity, an app that lets you take those coffee shop sounds with you anywhere. Perhaps the app is even more useful than we previously thought.

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