[crent]

I'm glad you shared your experience because I've dealt with this for decades. It's usually a small snippet, 15 seconds or less, of a song that just loops over and over for me.

What I do to combat this, and other "brain noise", is also to listen to music but I use headphones with high volume. I also listen to the same playlist repeatedly so it's not distracting and instead quiets that loud part of my brain to allow me to focus.

[chrisweekly]

Strong recommendation to use noise-cancelling instead of high volume. Hearing loss sucks! Protect your ears!

[thewebguyd]

Same, but instead of the same playlist I'll put the same song on repeat while working. It really does quiet the mind and lets me focus.

[chrisweekly]

Same. I posted upthread about my flowstate playlist, optimized for tracks to put on repeat for focus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43585365

[jaymzcampbell]

I'm relieved to know from reading this thread I'm not completely crazy. I have the same thing, a very, very short snippet just repeatedly "playing". I become very conscious of it at various moments and try to "change the track" to some other repeated snippet. I've yet to find a pattern to which track is next.

[threecheese]

Same. It’s five seconds of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” looping over and over and makes me want to crawl inside a blaring tuba to drown it out.

When people mention “intrusive thoughts” this is what comes to my mind.