I prefer to work in silence. But by that I mean actual silence. However, I live in a city where there's construction going on I can hear through my window. If I have to work from the office, there'll be colleagues yapping around (helps with creativity or whatever the sugarcoating is for the open office). Bonus points for one of the offices being next to a different construction site.

In these situations, I tend to prefer having some kind of "ambient" music on, instrumental only, so I can be isolated from the distracting environment. Noise cancelling doesn't work well enough against voices, although I do enjoy the reduction of random ambient noise (A/C hum and the like).

I'm similar except idk about silence, My preference would be natural local sounds, wind,bugs, birds (not mockingbirds lol) but have to settle for music pretty often.