Music possessing these qualities can often provide just the right amount of interest to occupy the parts of your brain that would otherwise be left free to wander and lead to distraction during your work.
Finally - someone who recognizes that there's a curious & busy part of the brain which must be kept preoccupied during complex tasks, and mixes music just for that purpose.
"Trance" music podcasts are a great approximation for this. (See "The Vocal Trance", "Above & Beyond: Trance Around The World", "The Perfect Mix", "Push The Night", "Perfecto Podcast", "The Sound of Trance", "Shakedown Podcast")
ETA: Alas, too many managers don't understand this; they think you're getting distracted by the music, and can't comprehend that it is necessary to facilitate focus.
Emillon, thanks. Some of those Music To Code By mixes have a fair amount of vocals though. I think nowadays, a lot of coders would prefer my weekly radio show at www.chma.fm.
The drawback with the radio show is that each episode has a 25 to 60 second promo tape at the intro, but after that it's all music, no advertising, and I don't do voiceovers. I'd recommend episodes starting at about #070 - I was still trying to find a groove in the first seventy, and I only stopped doing an intro voiceover in the early 70's.
They're also on SoundCloud (I just archived them all starting a few weeks ago) so you can skip around easily if you need to: http://www.soundcloud.com/djbolivia
They are definitely a bit darker, more tech-house. I guess the style changes within each show, but from show to show it's consistent. The first half of each show is generally low-key tech-house, but then I start speeding it up a small amount and using more "busy" progressive house tracks later in the episode. But not many vocals in each. Some people will like these better (the sound quality is also better), but some coders will definitely prefer the six older "Music To Code" By mixes.
All of their music is released under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial purposes. They offer a wide variety of trance genres, including Goa, Progressive, Psychedelic, Uplifting, etc. Plus, all music can be downloaded in FLAC, WAV and MP3 formats.
As a musician, I love it. That's probably half due to roughly 70% of my songs ending up as trance by the time I'm done though. What is it about it that you dislike exactly?
Let me be clear: I have no issue with trance as a form (highly repetitive 140 bpm 4/4 dance music). But trance music as a scene since the mid-90's has been characterized by melodramatic, over-produced, formulaic and not forward-thinking music. It's akin to being a filmmaker and disliking plotless Hollywood action films.
These days there's a lot of innovative and interesting dance music coming out in the wake of dub step. I tend to play stuff like this:
I don't know, it's compelling and I do have soft spot for this kind of stuff, but I find it as "melodramatic, over-produced [and] formulaic" as anything on Anjuna. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but it doesn't satisfy me at all intellectually. It's like candy: tastes good while you're eating it, but doesn't feed the body like food or the soul like a warm cup of tea. I think in this analogy, programming music should be like gum or a cinnamon stick!
I'm 7 days late and I doubt you'll ever see this, but thank you for that Andy Stott youtube vid. I'm a big fan of the folks doing more fractured/cracked/drone stuff (Burial/Gas/Basic Channel/etc), I've never heard of Stott, and this stuff is easily up there with the best.
For a quick intro, just tune to di.fm's trance channel. They have a lot of great trance radio shows; Global DJ Broadcast with Markus Schulz, A State of Trance with Armin Van Buuren, the aforementioned Trance Around The World, Global Trance Grooves with John 00 Fleming, etc.
For easily downloadable podcasts, Sander van Doorn's Identity (although he's leaning more electro these days), The Gareth Emery Podcast, and Global Trance Grooves are good ones.
I second this. di.fm is playing for about half my work day, and often when I'm at home too. I love the Trance and Vocal Trance channels, with forays into EuroClub, DubStep and Chillout Dreams.
Trance/Ambient stuff drives me nuts. For the longest time it jaded my view of electronic music because I thought it defined it. I prefer faster beats, well structured complex melodies a la Skrillex http://soundcloud.com/skrillex/sets. The first few listens might be a little distracting but once I know the songs I find myself typing like I'm playing the song with my keyboard.
While I'm not that fond on the Trance/Ambient combination, there is out there trance with faster beats and more complex melodies (albeit not sure if we commonly share what more complex means).
> I prefer faster beats, well structured complex melodies a la Skrillex
Skrillex and dubstep in general typically has a lower BPM than Trance. Skrillex usually works in the 120s, whereas trance is usually in the 130s-140s. You seem to be lumping trance and ambient together; however, they're quite different! I would argue that trance typically has more complex melodies than dubstep, which focuses more on tambre variations (ie crazy bass distortion). If you want to hear a cool trance track with high BPM and a nice complex melody, check out Duke Can't Come Home by Oza: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA9If-QkXQk As with all electronic music, you kind of have to sit through the first 32 bars or so for it to get to the good part; these parts of songs are really only there so that DJs can mix them together more easily.
As Tossrock, dubstep is usually a pretty slow BPM. I'm a fan of fast myself and usually listen to a lot of DNB & breakcore (up to 190bpm), you might enjoy it.
I realized today that I've been listening to the same playlist 203 songs for about a year now. It usually plays all day long. I'm kind of bored with it when I'm actually paying attention to it and want to listen to music, but it's great for programming. The songs are so well known to me at this point that I don't really consciously think about them. My brain just kind of sings along without me while I write code.
I'm not a programmer, I work in information security (monitor/response) but I've experienced something similar. My manager listens to music/podcasts, most of my coworkers do as well, but when someone from another team walks by, they assume we're doing nothing based on comments I've heard, "you have headphones in, obviously you're not busy". No, I'm just trying to concentrate. Thanks for interrupting with your smartass remark.
"there's a curious & busy part of the brain which must be kept preoccupied during complex tasks" this is so true - I've found, besides listening to music, I can actual half-listen to lectures/talks while I program, and concentrate considerably better than in quiet. Counter-intuitive but works really well.
I couldn't agree more about the Trance podcasts. It's great that these podcasts have no breaks (mixing each song into the next). Music like that with a good beat and lots of crescendos/decrescendos can be ideal for tuning out everything around me and staying focused for a long period of time.
I personally am a big fan of a couple of the radio stations in the 'Ambient' section in iTunes. A big shout out for DroneZone, although anything from SomaFM is pretty good.
Little known fact: only the webapp part of Pandora is IP-restricted. The media servers are open to the world. So as long as you can load the player through a tunnel, the actual mp3s can go through your normal connection.
This is definitely one of the areas that is to each his/her own.
I found (the majority of) trance music superficial and get quite easily bored listening to them. Songs with lyrics messes with the language processing module of the brain and I don't want that kind of distraction. So I listen to classical, instrumental, OST and some techno (that are NOT tons of bass).
Example of songs I am listening to now:
Pierre Bensusan - Kourouts Nota (highly recommended)
My absolute favourite album to code to would actually be the Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk, but I've also spent the last few years at uni listening to http://www.prettylightsmusic.com/ while I code: his albums are all available for free/donation, and the genre is kind of down-tempo electronic. There's the occaisonal vocal sample, but I've found it doesn't distract me from work.
I listen to the Tron Legacy soundtrack a few times a week. It's perfect for getting shit done. Enough intensity to keep me focused, not enough to be distracting.
I'm also partial to Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport when I want something weirder, and DRMHLLR when I want something less electronic.
The Tron Legacy OST is always fun, but it's even better when you listen to it doing something suitably epic, because many tracks sound so unapologetically grand. Perfect sound track for handing in an important paper and doing mountain climbing. Or doing mock epic things: feel like Batman while chopping onions.
Some of the tracks from the remix album are also pretty cool.
I used to find http://musicforhackers.com/ the perfect background to coding, but they're down, and I've never worked out another source of the sort of stuff they played.
My go-to artist is Zoe Keating (layered cello, and on bandcamp as an added bonus: http://music.zoekeating.com/). She's also quite interesting to follow: she's heavily into twitter, and is quite open about her profits, dealings with labels, etc.
Otherwise though, vocal-less trance is usually pretty effective. I love all the recommendations these threads bring up -- thanks everyone!
This is wonderful; thank you for the link. Just bought the download. :)
I've recently been hooked on 41 Strings, a short vocal-less composition by Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). He's performed it live in a bunch of places, but it's available for download here: http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/blog/download-nick-zinners...
If you use background music only for noise cancellation (crying babies, reconstruction works etc.), I recommend http://www.simplynoise.com/. It's not as distracting as even the most minimalistic trance.
Ah nice. Definitely bookmarking this. Also related, I started using rainymood, fireplace and jazz loops found on a reddit thread from a while back [1]. After using different combinations of the 3, I've found that sometimes music doesn't cut it, and a simple fireplace/rain loop helps me work better.
Whilst not music, I find listening to http://www.rainymood.com to be great for concentrating. It's a 30 minute sample of a rain storm.
It got me through my Master's dissertation, where I had it on loop for hours at a time.
Fiddler tells me you can currently grab the mp3 from here http://173.193.205.68/audio/RainyMood.mp3
(this was especially useful for the times I wanted to be disconnected from the internet to focus on work).
Oh wow, this is brilliant. I had heard of rainy mood before, but I'm so grateful you've found an mp3 of it. This is going to be on my mp3 player all the time now.
"If someone integrated a contextual playlist generator into a web-IDE and changed the music based on length of current session, degree of nesting or other complexity values, time of day based on location, etc..., I think it would be a much appreciated feature."
I wish these were compiled in a Soundcloud - something mobile-friendly that lets you skip around in a mix without downloading the thing. And the hosting is pretty slow.
Agreed, I didn't want to waste a hundred megabytes of the owner's bandwidth (plus the time to download) just to sample the file, so I pasted the link into a media player to stream it. However, it was not able to jump ahead in the program I used (Media Player Classic).
I used to be able to dev to any kind of music or talk, but it's gotten harder as I've gotten older. Sometimes I try to pick music that culturally matches the web site I'm working on.
- Classical: sometimes pleasant, but can be too dramatic.
- Hard electronic (dance, club, dubstep): too distracting
Minimal or ambient techno tends to be way to go when I'm trying to focus on something, but need something to keep that part of my mind occupied. Soma.FM and Digitally Imported have the best streaming stations for that, IMHO.
I pretty much just play Trent Reznor when I don't feel like putting together a playlist.
I've also really enjoyed listening to motorik rhythms lately. Something about that beat makes me feel like I'm constantly moving forward. Stereolab are the modern masters...
1. As vishaldpatel notes, the pattern resembles meditative mantras. However the mind reacts to religious chanting, "trance" resembles that and invokes similar focus to the exclusion of other distractions. Indeed, we call the music "trance" for a reason.
2. The music does not demand attention to itself. Most other music is created with a "drop what your doing and pay attention to ME" sense, and we go to concerts and pay good money to listen to such music for what it is as the center of our attention at that time. Dance music derived from ambient origins creates a beautiful backdrop to something else, driving away other distractions and setting a pleasant environment for whatever we really want to do; most of it is created for, well, dancing - but the style where the focus is on self & moment, not on music or others & events.
In our culture, very little else combines to create this audio backdrop combining meditation and high energy. Most instruments demand the musician(s) focus on a full performance, and hence expect (hope?) the audience to give similar attention - the antithesis of what we're looking for here. Even "minimalist" acoustic[ish] music like Philip Glass & Steve Reich, which resembles "trance", requires an intense single-performance effort & focus of the performers, giving the implication to the audience that similar focus should return the favor.
Electronic music allows lots of free-running loops, zero-effort samples, edited-to-perfection sequences, and time-unconstrained editing after the fact - to wit, it's not created live, not intended for live performance, and the artist has no attitude of "I'm not utterly focused on perfect end-to-end performance of this, so I don't expect utter focus of the audience". Acoustic meditative music heads this way, but involves the performer in the focused activity; music isn't an ingrained part/consequence of coding.
Upshot: electronic music lends itself to creating coding-productive music. We'd like such music from other sources, but nothing else lends itself to producing such high-energy long-run content without demanding the listener's attention.
Interesting that the reasons given here mostly also apply to game soundtracks as well, which is mostly what I listen to while coding. (Overclocked Remix has some great compilations if you are looking.)
I suspect game soundtracks differ from film soundtracks in that they're the backdrop to something that's still interactive, but I'm not sure how that comes into play.
Music for 18 Musicians is usually my first choice whenever I want an hour of uninterrupted productivity. The piano and mallot lines are like a rhythmic propulsion system.
I am a music addict and can (and do) listen to almost all genres of music during coding. But a consistent pattern is that I rarely listen to _new_ music while coding. What happens to me is that when I am really concentrated, I start listening to one album over and over to make sure that the music doesn't surprise me or force my attention. Sadly, its also a way to kill albums for you real quick :).
At my workplace we have a contractor that listens to hardcore speed metal while coding. The really angry kind...
It is hilarious when you realise how calm he is working on the project, completely opposite to what the music is. My colleague prefers listening to old school rock, and my boss (coder as well) listens to classical music.
Definitely a lot of different tastes out there.
I personally am a trance/techno/electronic/dub step/vocal trance kinda person.
One of my favorite CDs for coding: Ecco the Dolphin. I'm not making it up, the CD by Spencer Nilsen is amazing, just perfect to code to. Also, the song "Water Ruins" from the video game Jet Force Gemini and anything by Opus III is excellent as well. Then there's "Just Hold On" by Jillian Aversa, and Super Metroid remixes on OCRemix, "Kindred," "Avien," and "Solitude." And I have dozens of trance CDs for coding too.
I just started trying to improve my focus with isolating earbuds (haven't invested in noise cancelling cans yet) and rainymood.com. I heard the term "ambient" recently and decided to give it a try on Pandora, and got Lichen (#19) from Vol. 2 as the first track. I picked up both albums from Amazon soon after. Having no previous connection to electronic music at all and only knowing Aphex Twin from "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" (not my thing), I was pleasantly surprised.
Some of it's a little dark and/or tweaky, but most of it is great to have on while working, and it covers a range of upbeat/downbeat without ever getting into "dance beats", which don't help me at all.
Bogdan Raczynski's stuff can be quite nice and varies from acoustic Polish roots on accordion to 8bit beats and well executed video game nostalgia.
Lots of stuff on Warp records does nicely, as already mentioned. Autechre, Boards of Canada, Of Montreal. I've been listening to Evil Twin by Modeselector way too often recently.
I assume that most people here like to keep it mellow. I also listen to Amorphis (melodic metal) and lots of underground hip-hop, especially when I have to do administrative work and need a change of pace.
I used to listen Aphex Twin's music, works great for me, but now I mostly listening to The Flashbulb's compositions, can listen it for a whole day. Arboreal and Kirlian Selections albums are pure piece of art.
For me they are two 'states'. When i am doing something 'tough/complicated/new etc' that needs 100% of my attention i need complete silence, no music, no sounds, nothing. When that's not the case (95% of time) i am fine with any kind of music, my taste goes from dubstep to classical and based on the mood i am fine to listen to anything.
I cannot agree more. Often it makes me wish there was some type of program/device that plays music based on concentration levels.
What happens when I start getting into something complicated, is that I notice the music. Until this point, it's just kind of in the background. It feels like my brain's saying, "Not enough CPU to play music and work on this problem. Please eliminate the problem."
Buddhists often chant mantras to stay in meditation. I suspect that a steady beat / rhythm has a lot more to do with concentrating than any specific genre. It gets the rest of our minds jogging along with the thing we're trying to achieve.
Stuff like a lot of post rock, such as Explosions in the Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Another option is Math Rock like Battles (I am actually listening to Gloss Drop right now).
I was recently pointed to http://block.fm/ as I like to go with some beats to work with and they have some great Dnb and electronica shows.
Usually I can't cope with any words, lyrics in the song or presenters on a show, but if I can't understand the words, in this case because I speak no Japanese, it's not a problem and sometimes it's nice to have voices (outside my head) as part of the white noise.
Indeed, the presenters on DnB shows are usually really hard to understand. "Big ups to cheesy grifter in tha gleebow huppa dig walla shim bam to ya fo keepin it real ya". I have no idea what they are saying. Since it's supposedly English, my mind has to try and parse it. Very distracting.
:) I feel I should point you in the direction of the Hospital records podcast, in case you haven't found it http://www.hospitalrecords.com/broadcast/.
The usual presenter is the label boss Tony Coleman, and a nicer man you'll be hard pressed to find. No posing, no cheese, no slang and a constant positive attitude. Plus it's an absolutely superb label.
Personally I find music without vocals, or very familiar music in the background to be useful. Blocks out the occasional car going past. Post-rock is really good unless it sends you into a trance haha.
Actually hate working with headphones on now. Similarly using music I love to block out noisey work environments doesn't work. (Well, noisey work environments just don't work do they!).
Reading through the comments, I'm glad that there are people on HN who know what good music is - from Trance and Ambient to Dubstep and what not.
And I want to say that Com Truise's album Galactic Melt is one of the best albums for me for 2011. It gets even better if you combine it with Daft Punk's TRON OST and put those two on shuffle.
I will add my 5 cents with a mention of Qawwali music and specifically works of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustt_Mustt. This is not just a ticket to the zone for me, more like a teleport :)
I was playing Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto when a contractor came for an on-site and he remarked on how it was good "design music". He mentioned he preferred ambient music whilst doing cognitively intensive work. When doing something rote, rock, pop or metal was a good choice.
Ludovico Einaudi and Max Richter put me in the mood quite nicely. Mozart, the three tenors, and similar stuff also work (but most of the time not as good as the former artists).
Nonetheless that's rara avis among my coworkers, anyone else listening to similar stuff while coding?
I typically just listen to my rockabilly/psychobilly station, I can't handle the trance/techno/ambient/whatever music everybody else seems to advocate. A good Reverend Horton Heat track has a good beat and fast pace too, it's just a lot more fun for me.
OK, the site seems down. I managed to download half a mix until i got timeouts. If anyone managed to download those track, a mirror somewhere else, or a torrent would be really nice.
Anyone care to provide us with a mirror?
Ulrich Schnauss, System 7, Man With No Name, Art of Trance, Dimension 5, Jean Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Astral Projection, Kraftwerk, VNV Nation...
i can't handle the monotony of trance, and dubstep can be a bit too much. a lot of dnb also tends to be repetitive, but finny keeps things lively enough for you to pay attention to code
The stuff that works best for me is the Phillip Glass early crossover stuff (i.e. post-Einstein.) Things like Glasspieces, Dancepieces, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, The Photographer, and the three *qatsi films. They're minimal enough not to intrude on the foreground, but also not as harsh and "difficult" as the early stuff like large chunks of Einstein (except the knee plays) and Music in 12 Parts.
Finally - someone who recognizes that there's a curious & busy part of the brain which must be kept preoccupied during complex tasks, and mixes music just for that purpose.
"Trance" music podcasts are a great approximation for this. (See "The Vocal Trance", "Above & Beyond: Trance Around The World", "The Perfect Mix", "Push The Night", "Perfecto Podcast", "The Sound of Trance", "Shakedown Podcast")
ETA: Alas, too many managers don't understand this; they think you're getting distracted by the music, and can't comprehend that it is necessary to facilitate focus.