I was lucky enough to score a second-hand set of Deutche Grammophon's Complete Beethoven Edition at an estate sale, and I like to crank up the piano sonatas when coding (and save the symphonies for consensual sex and ultraviolence). When I'm not rocking out to the Ludwig van, I've got some other stuff I like to play while coding:
* Thank You Scientist: Maps of Non-Existent Places and Terraformer
* Starfarer: Voyagers
* Marcus Miller: Renaissance
* Betamaxx: Plug And Play
* Hiromi Uehara with Trio Project: Voice
* Hiromi Uehara: Spectrum
* Liquid Tension Experiment
* Joe Satriani: Surfing with the Alien, The Extremist, Crystal Planet, Black Swans and Wormhole Wizards, Unstoppable Momemtum
* Galneryus: The Flag of Punishment, Advance to the Fall, and Beyond the End of Despair
* Therion: Vovin, Deggial, Secret of the Runes, Lemuria, Sirius B, Gothic Kabbalah
* Judas Priest: Sad Wings of Destiny, Sin After Sin, Stained Class
I have seen myself iterating a lot more during a session where I would listen to trance music instead of 2000s punk rock.
Is it the smaller amount of lyrics? I don't know, but I'm convinced I have observed a higher productivity when listening to high bpm music in the past 5 years.
Great for writing a hydra. A multi-headed worm to break an encryption and then sniff out latent digital footprints throughout an encrypted network.
2018-07-20: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17573053
2016-11-01: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12844434
2012-02-18: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605957
2012-02-03: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547694
The repetitive, gentle sounds put me into a high efficiency mode without putting me to sleep like most ambient.
[0]: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nrgTossoB0
mmkay, thats nice, but what do you listen to for non-consentual sex?
/s
What kind of music I listen to really depends on my mood. It could be dubstep (Excision, Teminite, PsoGnar, to name a few out of my current dub playlist), various forms of metal (anywhere from After Forever to Xandria, In Flames, you name it); some times even Happy Hardcore / Handsup.
Generally, if I'm feeling well I prefer high BPM happy sounds, which -- together with some caffeinated drinks -- makes me incredibly productive. The darker my mood, the darker my taste of music gets, with also a few slower sounds. I can't really put numbers on my performance here, as on those days I prefer work that isn't easily evaluated performance-wise.
Restraining myself to join in with just a single recommendation - Jan Jelinek's 'Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records' is the record I always post on these kind of threads and it always seems to land well with this crowd. It is probably my favourite example of the genre, and the production is so textured and the instrumentation has so many subtle aspects, it holds up very well to multiple listens.
Alright, two recommendations - the first time I clocked a 14+HR session was when I was listening through Skinshape's discography (comfy, catchy, mellow indie)
Have a look at https://www.steadymixes.com for 130BPM mixes and mashups to keep your pace moving.
Some kinds work better for this than others.
Yep. And perfectly illustrated by many of the comments being about what works for them. in particular.
Sometimes I even listen to talk programs and don't lose pace (depending on the task). The horror.
Probably half of the "flow" time I've had has been listening to that one track. Hundreds and hundreds of loops. I'm not sure if this is a recommendation of the track or condemnation of my sanity.
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"!
Here is my playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6yHQaBX599OnGlojw5aDTB?si=...
It's good for driving long distances too. But otherwise, my musical taste is totally different.
But I'm a musical illiterate
This applies to programming for me because sometimes I need music that promotes creative thinking. Sometimes research. And sometimes, my favorite, hammering out the code because I have a rock solid idea on implementation and trajectory.
The wrong music in any one of those steps is actively harmful to my work. The right music promotes it. Silence on the other hand is weirdly deafening to me, usually. Sometimes I have to pause my music and talk myself through a problem, and sometimes in doing that I forget to turn the music back on. I frequently find myself 1 hour later, super tense in the shoulders and all around stiff. It's a weird and stressful state. The silence is too loud.
Pay attention to the lyrics. Treat it as a story, and try to guess at what's happening. There is a canon answer -- Aviator's albums are in fact all stories -- but try to come up with your own before you look for it.
Everyone sees something different in the lyrics.
I love Raggae but it's terrible for programming. It's too chill and wordy.
https://music.apple.com/de/playlist/piano-chill/pl.cb4d1c09a...
I love scuba diving. If there was a monitor with rotating images of underwater scenes, I wouldn’t just think it was pretty. I’d be glued to it figuring out where they took the shot, wondering how deep they were and wishing I was there. I’m guessing something similar happens with you and music.
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.
I'd be curious to know if there are any serious musicians here who can concentrate on writing code or any other similarly mentally-intensive task while listening to music.
Music is never a background to me. I will occasionally switch music on while working, but with the specific purpose to switch my mind. Usually either when I am trying to work out the best solution to some problem and I need to get away from it for a second or when I am task switching.
OTOH, yeah there are definitely times when I prefer peace and quiet.
But when there's music, I like to enjoy it thoroughly, concentrating on it. I cannot really control it, and it's impossible for me to focus on code or reading when there's music playing around. I contrast this with most of my friends that seem to listen to music almost the whole day.
As a cautionary tale, I used to have very good hearing as well, probably because I didn't listen to music or go to concerts as much as my peers. I think I lost that, mostly as a result of joining my university's brass band... Use earplugs if you do. I could only fully concentrate in very silent environments (almost anechoic), but nowadays I'm doing better as a result (and I now hear this buzzing noise floor when things get too silent). And I now have trouble hearing people in noisy environments: hearing loss impacted both my ability to pick faint noises, and to differentiate noise sources. I still have average hearing, I think, though I should get it tested. Unsure if I can get it back.
For people who can't listen to music: how about noise generators (e.g. https://mynoise.net/) to drown out ambient noise?
Listen to music without human voices. Lyrics are distracting.
Maybe use OST music for films and games. This music is designed to not to compete for your attention with whatever you're watching or examining.
I recently discovered I have a tendency to unconsciously listen to everything around me and analyze it, aggravating my mental fatigue. now I try to be careful and avoid doing that.
The app is a bit clunky though.
If it's something tedious, i.e. robotically making some kind of change throughout a code base, then my attention span can handle the additional load and the music may help me not procrastinate.
But for anything involving serious thinking, all forms of music I've tried are too much of a distraction.
I have ADD, which may be a factor.
Though I cannot listen to anything spoken word like podcasts or talk radio. Drives me absolutely nuts.
referring to how the character murders people or has threesomes in the film to a symphony.
It's not 100%, but they'll get rid of like 80% of the background noise without playing anything. To get that last 20% yeah you need something playing to help mask it(even at an extremely low volume).
Sometimes I wear mine with nothing playing while at work just to get rid of random office chatter.
I do have noise canceling headphones and I like them, but they don't really do a lot for people talking.
> 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...
That's probably then reason. The more you know about music and music production the more it consumes resources of your brain.
And btw, there's also a fourth mix for the Near Mint web radio: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/near-mint-8th-march-2016-...
But as heavy-artillery concentration music, I recommend TechnoLiveSets. It's the ‘accidentally done all work in one day’ grade material: https://www.techno-livesets.com/
P.S. I'm also gonna gripe about lack of volume controls on the site, which for some reason a bunch of sites consider acceptable. All volume levels on my machine are carefully tuned—and then this site comes along for which I have to fiddle with the master volume. While listening to this explicitly background music, I'll likely come across some videos that I'll want to watch for ten seconds—and then I'll have to either crank the video volume, or scramble to stop the music each time. Don't do this.
On top of that, site authors' ideas of proper volume pretty much never matches mine: Bandcamp and Soundcloud both have to be cranked down a lot: Soundcloud's embedded clips make me lower the system volume to 1/4th of a notch on my Mac, which is about 1/32nd the normal volume for me.
Somewhat related: I’m an amateur photographer and have studied photography extensively. When I see pictures I can’t help but mentally pull them apart to determine how they were made. Seems like musicians might have the same inclination.
Right now, my absolute favorite is “cockpit” brown noise (the sound of muffled airline jet noise). For example, you could set this track to repeat endlessly: https://open.spotify.com/track/01Kk9an41cyVj7oIXd2Fsj?si=NnC...
For whatever reason, it gives me the feeling of “fast” (jet), important (I’m the pilot of this important thing?), and cozy (strapped in tight in the cockpit), and I never get the distracted (hmmm! What is this song?) feeling that I usually get from programming to music.
FYI: Difference between “white”, “pink”, & “brown” noise: https://www.soundofsleep.com/2017/07/18/white-pink-brown-noi...
My Bose QC35 set is ~4 years old, on their second set of muffs and only play sound when I fly, once or twice a year.
There's tons of hour+ mixes on YouTube. Just a random one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk1nnAHI1mI
However, when I need by subconscious to scan a vast non-verbal solution space, nothing is quite as good as energetic, information-dense jazz. It helps silence my inner verbal dialogue that just gets in the way.
Some or my mental wires may or may not have been repatched by my conservatory degree.
The author's introduction to generative music article (https://medium.com/@metalex9/introduction-to-generative-musi...) is also very interesting.
I'm not a huge music-theory guy or anything, but it's virtually impossible for me to "tune out" music; I think I subconsciously like to dissect it a bit.
However, if someone were to put on virtually any sporting event on the TV (without announcers and assuming you didn't have a bunch of people cheering or anything like that), it would have almost no affect on me, since I don't really care at all about sports.
Unfortunately the corporate filter only lets the last few ones through.
Nowadays I wear in-ear monitoring on stage which helps quite a lot, protection-wise. I've recently read about a study (dunno if it was on hn) where they discovered that vibrations behind the ear lessend the volume of the tinnitus. I am so going to try that if I ever get my hands on such a device.
I still have a very good hearing overall (especially in the base region), so I should not complain.
Here are some sources I like:
Boiler Room (all EDM/dance genres)—https://m.youtube.com/user/brtvofficial/videos?view=0&sort=p...
Anjunadeep (deep house)—https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOftnzGIKwJB1h6ErEcFJTO...
As to why some people have an easier time doing it than others, no clue. I have a background in music so I suspect that plays some role. I need absolute silence in order to concentrate.
Still - I can barely code or work in general without music. Not any music though, that's for sure.
Just like for the parent poster, I recommend in-ear headphones. You put them in the ears, and that's all. Listen to all the sound of no one talking and nothing playing.
Have you tried white noise instead?
White noise: equal energy per Hz (flat)
Pink noise: equal energy per octave (-3dB/octave)
Brown noise: spectrum of Brownian motion (-6dB/octave)
White and brown are easy to create mathematically.
Haven't been diagnosed, but attention span is pretty short.
But when I'm implementing the design, I find music very helpful. Just turning the code from design to actual code takes less focus from me, so I can end up getting distracted by other things in my environment if I don't have something else that can "fill up" the remaining amount of mental attention bandwidth. Also podcasts work even better than music for this.
Currently Insomnium is on rotation - ironic name given the above statement.
Me: Single source only, absolutely can't listen to music while trying to code or read. I have used https://mynoise.net/ and the Android app to drown out environmental noise when I'm working around others. I'm very easily distracted by noise, especially things like speakerphone conferences. Music to me is a single focus thing, I can't do anything else and have to focus only on the music.
Her: can hold a conversation with me while listening to a podcast and simultaneously playing a phone game. Music is very much something that happens while she is busy doing other stuff, even when it's her favourite songs and she's rocking out singing along.
It was a revelation to her when we discussed this. She was completely unaware that to me, trying to hold a conversation if I was already listening to music was almost painful. She's adjusted her expectations and knows that if my good headphones are on, it's my music time. We both love music so much, it's an integral part of our gen-x upbringing, yet our different attention problems lead us to consume it in very different ways.
(and, yes, she's awesome. I'm amazed daily by her and count myself incredibly lucky to find someone as kind, understanding, funny, loving, sexy and brilliant as her)
sorry if that's TMI.
Also, the idea of you fine tuning certain individuals out is hilarious to me. Nice job on saving your sanity!
For really repetitive thought-free stuff (e.g. mopping a floor), music that I would listen to while just sitting down is fine. For less repetitive stuff, either something with a set pattern (like 8-bar blues) or something I know well enough to "tune out" when I need more focus on the task at hand is better.
It's precisely via Gamelan, which led me to Akira OST gamelan sounds, that I've discovered Geinoh Yamashirogumi (which then led to Muslimgauze, tangentially)
Cheers!
1. Get any in-ear earbuds (for noise even cheapy ones are fine, for music pick whatever type you like).
2. Get the foam tips to fit them: https://www.complyfoam.com/products/t-series/
3. Put some hearing-protection ear-muffs on top
A tiny amount of noise will make all other sounds disappear at this point.
But I find it quite distracting if I don't have music on while coding, and I prefer music with lyrics, EDM/Pop/Rock types.
Rarely, when I've got to think a lot and basically hold huge complex flows in my head, I've found brain.fm to be the best.
I have but since I don't have perfect pitch, I'm not getting anywhere. Plus it seems like the frequency has a certain amount of smear which might be hampering things even more.
I would love to try notch filtering but without the key frequencies, I'm doomed (although the tinnitus stuff on mynoise.net does help knock it down for short periods).
For me, it really depends on my mood and what I'm working on which type of music is appropriate. Some days it's rap and the flood of words doesn't get in the way even. Other days it has to be instrumental bluegrass or similar.
Not mixes, but I like BT's "These Hopeful Machines" and Oceanlab's "Sirens of the Sea" albums, too.
I also can't have the radio on in my car if I plan to actually think. It's hard for me to even imagine how people are able to concentrate with active music playing or, worse, a television show running in the room. I'm always reminded how different I am every time I stay at one of those hotels that has a communal free breakfast area. They invariably have TVs tuned to those 'happy babble' morning talk shows and most people seem to have no problem working, reading, or carrying on a conversation with it running constantly into their brain.
Apparently, some of us are just made differently. I have an occasional multi-hour drive I need to do and I will sometimes listen to music, a good podcast or an audiobook but I'm actively listening to it. Most often though I drive in complete silence and just think. Some of my friends are surprised by this and can't imagine just sitting in silence that long. However, I love it.
I'm pretty sure the community won't really like the idea of bots on HN because of spam issues and such, but what is the official policy on this? Can't find anything about bots anywhere.
If I am already in the zone, metal works best.
I’ll give my input. This is my go to focus sound: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dWjKZbkcYdA
Softly-spoken words in a language I do not understand seem to work.
It may be that I am just selecting for sounds that I can ignore. When I really need to concentrate I, like the OP of this thread, prefer silence, though, unlike the OP, I am not musically knowledgeable.
What I've been doing that's actually been quite effective is I'll just loop the same energizing song over and over for the entire work day, sometimes even for multiple days. For me it helps keep me energized while also letting the song fade into the background since it's on repeat. I'm sure many people would not be able to stand this, but it's been the perfect solution for me.
I don't know Korean well enough to even lex the syllables out of the audio stream, so kpop works really well for me for work listening.
I don't think she had ADHD though so maybe it was different for her and more of a sensory thing. I just appreciate that you two are so different (in this aspect) and still able to respect and adapt to each other's differences.
My favourite bands of the moment are Haken, Devin Townsend, Liquid Tension Experiment, Steven Wilson (et al). Also aptly named is French band The Algorithm. Want more extreme ? Try Pryapisme. More Jazz/fusion-y ? Nova Collective.
[1] as opposed to thinking without coding, which usually comes first and requires complete silence, paper and pen.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2hLUvezSiJ2TpmSQq27IQI?si=...
This is a ~21hr mix I use basically daily when getting into flow - I love it. It's mostly high-energy electronic, some electro-swing, and I'm sure a whole bunch of other genres I'm not equipped to describe (not a music nerd).
Almost all of the music has been discovered through using Spotify Radio, Pandora, etc. and saving the songs I really liked / helped me keep the groove going.
It might or might not work for you, but always happy to share. Also - feedback welcome! If you like this and there's some other stuff I'm missing out on, lmk :)
Some good stuff I play(ed): - Terrence Dixon - from the far future - Omar S and Shadow Ray - OASIS COLLABORATING - Aphex Twin - Ambient - Brian Eno ambient albums - Musik von Harmonia
Some tracks:
* Dimension Essential Mix (DnB): https://soundcloud.com/dimension_uk/essential-mix
* Nicolas Jaar Essential Mix (Various): https://soundcloud.com/otherpeoplerecords/csp06-nicolas-jaar...
* Mano Le Tough Essential Mix (House): https://soundcloud.com/manoletough/essential-mix
* Charlotte De Witte Essential Mix (Techno): https://soundcloud.com/charlottedewitte-essentialmix2018-02-...
* Diplo Burning Man 2019 (EDM): https://soundcloud.com/diplo/diplo-burning-man-cloud-art-car and https://soundcloud.com/diplo/diplo-burning-man-tetrix-art-ca...
What do I have to gain by knowing it was posted several times before?
He lured me into buying an annual subscription with the promise that he would convert it to a lifetime subscription (which was available at some point). So I bough the annual subscription and from that moment I never had any more replies from him...
I sent a dummy question from another email address to see if he was simply ignoring me and I received a reply immediately.
So I downloaded the music I liked there (it's almost always repeating anyway), using a video/music grabber, and then cancelled my account.
That said, at the same time I pretty much have to listen to music while working, otherwise my brain is like 1/2 as functional. No clue why.
FTR I partially make a living as a musician, so maybe that's why?
Bach? No! Bach stops me in my tracks and I'm forced to devote my attention. Mozart? I'm apparently allergic to bad performances because unless the performance is perfect, the music... fails.
Beethoven? Yes! Not sure why, though.
For example, I've been listening to the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis soundtrack on Spotify. Something about 90s survival horror video game themes made for a 16 bit, 24 channel sound chip really gets my fingers typing!
I have ADHD, so working in an environment with lots of voices and other sounds is impossible for me.
I've also got tinnitus, so working in silence will drive me insane too.
I'm listening to music for upwards of 12 hours a day. It also helps that I have a real passion for music, mostly techno and psytrance, and also DJ and produce, so I love it.
BT's new ambient album has been a fun listen while coding, but I'm always out for more music since I tend to listen constantly. Thanks for the link!
For me, I can kinda participate in a dialog when distracted, but I'm definitely not pulling my weight in such cases, so the person on the other end has to do all the work.
For me that would be anything that I listened to during the all-nighters I pulled throughout college and the background noise in Star Trek TNG.
As a side note if you're working remotely and having trouble focusing on long calls, I recommend Tibetan signing bowls:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujyu7tkyxtw
They nicely fill in the gaps in the conversation.
Datassette has tracklists on Soundcloud (iirc), and Andy Clark, Keith Mansfield and James Asher seem to dominate his mixes (though Asher is apparently more into tribal music). Alas my favorite bit from Businessfunk 2 at 34:25 is unidentified.
However, when I need all of my mental energy to think architecture, understand or formulate a plan of action, music is distracting.
I like to work with quite but share an open workspace. Learn to tune out distractions by focusing.
Key example last week had a staff retreat to a bowling alley. I don't much like bowling so fired up Lichess on my phone. Tons of noise, talking and pins falling all around me but I'd rather focus on the game at hand and tune out distractions.
I suspect decades of karate training has helped build my ability to focus myself as needed.
Before this, I could not listen to music and code at the same time AT ALL. Then, I found a coding playlist with only full length albums with very little vocals, and I changed. I recently created my own flavor of the playlist with only albums that have a consistent flow from one song to the next.
Give it a try and fork it to make your own version!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLWXSsYJoWY&feature=list_rela...
Pandora: https://pandora.app.link/nKUbxNb4m2.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/71xXPTrKmQ72TpLZSV1DAU
Google Music: https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXynw1A1Qs30Ii8AKR...
In the noisy clusterfuck of sound our open office is, listening to music is a soothing balm.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KmEKavq5Ux0IxY2d5VfyI?si=...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh1Kbh5Ln8tMJ_h7IykOFkg/vid...
On a side note, I find it interesting how we buy noise cancellation headphones against airplane nose but also create playlist with these sounds.
https://soundcloud.com/featurecast/featurecast-keep-it-comin...
Current one: