When I was in high school, my math teacher would play Mozart during tests, claiming it would help us. It would drive me crazy, and I doubt that my grades improved as a result of the distraction.
For what it's worth, I have a BMus in Piano Performance. I love music... but never as "background noise"!
The closest thing I'll do to address my particular problem is find audio of stuff like thunderstorms or waterfalls and more ambient stuff. Personally, I find that much easier to tune out.
> we have found that the most effective music to aid prolonged periods of intense concentration tends to have a mixture of the following qualities:
Drones
Noise
Fuzz
Field recordings
Vagueness (Hypnagogia)
Textures without rhythm
Minor complex chords
Early music (Baroque, lute, harpsichord)
Very few drums or vocals
Synth arpeggios
Awesome / daunting / foreboding
Walls of reverb
However, I also suffer from an inability to get things done with people talking - I'm constantly inadvertently eavesdropping on my coworkers' conversations. I find that I have to push white noise up to uncomfortably dangerous levels to drown out conversation - your audio processing systems tolerate shockingly high SNR - but changing, musical audio like this is harder to tune out than thunderstorms or waterfalls and therefore permits me to turn down the volume.
I just wish someone would build an audio-cancelling headset, instead of the usual noise-cancelling ones that take away background noise but let voices come through clearly...