When I need to focus in a distracting or noisy environment, I use a combination of noise canceling headphones and brownian (brown) noise.

I find music and spoken word to be mostly distracting, but not listening to anything with noise canceling headphones doesn’t work so well. The combination of a wall of random frequencies and the noise canceling does a great job of blocking and masking outside noises.

Why not white noise? I find the frequencies too harsh; brown noise is more soothing, like an ocean wave. My current favorite noise generator is playnoise.com which has white, grey, pink, and brown, plus an option to enable the noises in stereo.

It’s neat, you should try it.