In every studio control room that has haunted me, there’s a particular moment that changes the fate of a song drastically.
The band has often gone home. The takes are in the session. The plugins are working overtime, glowing like a Christmas tree.
And at some point, someone leans back, squints at the speakers and says the most terrifying sentence in audio engineering:
“Your signal-to-noise ratio is off.”
Technically, most of us in the room will know what that means.
Signal is what we wanted to hear.
Noise, everything that could get in the way.
Noise, everything that could get in the way.
So we do what we can to save what we can.
EQ, compress, automate, gate, ride faders.
Hoping that the salvages result in what we thought the song was about to be.
How the rest of that story proceeds is a different story.
But what fascinates me is this:
Most musicians seem to understand this concept in the studio quite well...and then walk out the door and completely forget to apply it to their lives.
We obsess over headroom on a snare, but not headroom in our nervous system.
We fine-tune gain staging, but let our attention clip all day.
We demand clarity from a vocal, but live as if our inner voice is just another track in an overcrowded session of poor musicianship.
A Quick Translation for Non-Musicians
For those who’ve never recorded music professionally, “signal-to-noise ratio” isn’t your exotic, nerdy studio phrase.
It simply describes the strength of what matters (signal) in comparison to what distracts or distorts (noise).
A high SNR means clarity.
A low one means confusion.
Audio engineer or not, we’ve all felt it while trying to concentrate in chaos, or make decisions amidst overwhelm.
SNR ultimately is a life concept: when the meaningful signal becomes audible, life stops being reactive and starts becoming intentional.
The age of bad music production
We live in a culture that treats information overload as 'normal'.
Research across psychology and decision science has been warning us for decades: when the amount and diversity of information exceeds our capacity to process it, decision quality drops, confusion rises, and we take longer to choose while feeling worse about the choices we eventually end up making.
More recent work on digital information overload links this directly to stress, anxiety, and burnout.
In other words: when noise gets louder than signal, we don’t just “feel a bit scattered.” We literally become less capable of steering our lives well.
Cognitive research on noise and performance says something similar in a more literal way. Reviews of auditory noise show that irrelevant sound reliably impairs working memory and complex cognitive tasks.
On the emotional side, anxiety has been shown to weaken our ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli – whether those distractions are external (notifications, sounds) or internal (worrying thoughts).
Put bluntly: the more anxious and overloaded we are, the easier it is for noise to hijack us.
And the harder it is to stay with what actually matters.
Musicians, meet the entrepreneurs
Here’s the part that stings a little.
Some people saw this coming and built entire careers around protecting their signal (while often being major players in generating the very noise we struggle with).
Steve Jobs famously described his approach to creativity and leadership as a battle between signal and noise, with his role being to “minimize the noise” so the essential signal could emerge.
Internally, Apple used the “signal-to-noise ratio” metaphor to describe how much meaningful insight a product, meeting, or idea actually contained relative to fluff, or distraction.
Jobs’s obsession with simplicity wasn’t aesthetic. It was neurological. It was existential.
Reduce noise, amplify the signal, and everything becomes possible.
Meanwhile, artists and musicians, the ones who actually work with the literal version of this process, kept absorbing a different mythology.
Romanticising chaos.
Glorifying being “busy,” “booked,” “always on the go.”
Letting hype, not clarity, determine our priorities.
Glorifying being “busy,” “booked,” “always on the go.”
Letting hype, not clarity, determine our priorities.
We were taught to say yes to everything.
“For exposure.”
Or “you never know who will be in the room.”
“It’s only one more gig / collab / session / platform.”
We mastered the science of signal, creating art — but not the discipline of protecting its birth in the world.
The result is a strange irony: a world where the artist’s role could be more important than ever, with artists too overwhelmed to hear themselves clearly.
Inner signal vs outer noise
From a neuroscience perspective, you can think of your attention as a system that constantly switches between external and internal focus.
Recent research is starting to map how the brain toggles between attending to the outside world and to internal content like memories, imagery, and self-generated thought.
That inner space, when you’re not reacting to anything, just listening inward, is where most genuine artistic signal arises.
The melody that shows up in the shower. The poem that suddenly lands while you’re walking. The uncomfortable, honest thought about where you really want your career to go.
But there’s a catch.
A 2025 review on distraction distinguishes between external distraction (things pulling your attention from outside) and internal distraction (mind-wandering, intrusive thoughts, urges to check your phone). Both degrade performance when they’re not managed.
At the same time, earlier work by Eysenck and colleagues showed that anxious individuals struggle more to inhibit both external and internal distractions, especially when tasks demand a lot of mental effort.
So we have this delicate instrument — our attention, trying to protect a delicate signal: our inner voice.
All the while surrounded by an environment and a nervous system that are both incentivised to generate noise.
If we don’t consciously learn to work with that, the mix engineers itself.
And not in our favour.
How this plays out in real life
Career decisions
Signal might be the quiet, consistent knowing that you’re better off building a sustainable online ecosystem around your work than chasing random gig offers across three continents.
Noise is the panic that hits when you see other artists posting tour dates and you haven’t played out in a while.
Creative direction
Signal might whisper that the record you actually need to make next is smaller, more intimate, less “impressive,” but deeply honest.
Noise shouts that now is not the time to take risks.
Self-worth and comparison
Signal is the simple, grounded recognition that your worth as an artist is independent of the algorithm’s mood this week.
Noise is the storyline that every spike or dip in engagement is a verdict on your identity.
Relationships and boundaries
Signal is the part of you that knows when a collaboration, client, or mentor dynamic is quietly eroding your integrity.
Noise is the chorus of scarcity: “What if this is your only shot?”
Listening as a radical act
The point is not to escape noise. Noise is part of the environment. Some of it is even useful. The question is: does noise serve the signal, or drown it?
Install a pre-fader listen for major decisions
Before you say yes to a big commitment, sit with the raw feeling of it without external input.
Limit your channels
You don’t need less creativity. You need fewer channels for it to bleed into.
Design for stretches of undisturbed attention
You don’t need an ashram. You need pockets of time where your attention is not for sale.
Do regular noise audits
Look at your life like a song.
Which elements enrich the signal?
Which mask it?
Which mask it?
Redefine your tolerance for silence
Silence is not the absence of music. It’s where the song decides whether it wants to visit.
So we live in Disneyland now?
Here’s the twist the metaphor doesn’t tell you unless you’ve spent time in a real studio: sometimes, the best producers deliberately add noise.
Wait, what?
Ok, not the destructive kind, but to enhance the contrast.
Gentle saturation, harmonic distortion, tape hiss… artefacts that make a sound feel warmer, more human, more alive.
In other words, not all noise was created equally.
Sometimes it’s the very thing that makes the signal believable.
But how?
An illusion many spiritual or philosophical gurus try to sell is the fantasy of a frictionless life.
(Like Disneyland.)
But the beauty of real music, just like real life, lies in the friction.
Pain. Heartbreak. Love. Hate.
And love despite all of this. Rising above all.
The irony is public knowledge in the lives of some of the richest people in the world who went out of their way to engineer worlds free of friction, only to find more of it through isolation, distorted identity, and the kind of existential flatness that results in a very different brand of poverty.
The takeaway? What we’re ultimately seeking isn’t a pristine, sterile existence.
It’s connection.
But to connect without collapsing into chaos, we have to start with our own signal — the one voice that rings honest underneath the static.
When that becomes clear, the connections we form are not compensatory. They are contextual. Harmonic. Resonant.
Musical in the deepest sense of the word.
In the end
Signal-to-noise ratio is not a romantic metaphor. It’s a brutally practical question.
Does our inner voice stand a chance in the environment we’ve built around it?
Mute a few tracks. Pull some faders down.
Listen long enough for the truth to come through.
Then, when it does, have the courage to let it be the loudest thing in the room.
References
Eppler, M. J., & Mengis, J. (2004). The concept of information overload: A review of literature from organization science, accounting, marketing, MIS, and related disciplines. The Information Society, 20(5), 325–344.
Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. (2009). The dark side of information: Overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies. Journal of Information Science, 35(2), 180–191.
Kryter, K. D. (1994). The Handbook of Hearing and the Effects of Noise. Academic Press.
Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336–353.
Callard, F., Smallwood, J., Golchert, J., & Margulies, D. S. (2013). The era of the wandering mind? Twenty-first century research on self-generated mental activity. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 891.
Keller, A. S., Payne, L., & Sekuler, R. (2020). Distracted by internal and external factors: A review of mind-wandering and distraction. Psychological Bulletin, 146(6), 525–547.
Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster.
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 946–958.
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