I found this about 6 years ago and it has genuinely changed the way I work. I can’t listen to music that has any “real” vocals (i.e the vocals are the focus, unlike a lot of electronic music) while programming as it distracts me.
But these compilations are perfect - it lets me slip into a state of flow quicker than anything I’ve listened to before or since. It’s not particularly enjoyable in and of itself, but if I’m in a situation where I really need to get something done and focus then it’s my go-to.
You might also like the Groove Salad channel on https://somafm.com. At least, for me music with vocals distracts, while both musicforprogramming and Groove Salad work great.
Their Black Rock FM is also nice. What I get a kick from is when I suddenly know how to solve the problem and music changes accordingly, gives you a hacker-movie-like feel :)
As long as the vocals are not in a language I speak, they're fine by me. I think not understanding the vocals frees our mind to concentrate in text-based tasks.
Ironically, I hate electronic and techno pump-pump-pump music, but I enjoy chiptunes, specially classic videogame soundtracks. I have to listen to them with earphones, otherwise my colleagues will think I'm playing games instead of working.
Lately I've found that music by the band KISS is great for coding. The songs are energetic enough to keep me focused and awake, but not so deeply rich in composition or lyrical content that I'm going to get distracted.
I have had a similar experience with the band Ministry. High energy, drowns out any background chatter, gets me into a flow state, somehow. I think it is partially because they are not a band I really listen to for pleasure so I don’t know any of the songs particularly well, and there is a high amount of distortion in the vocals so I don’t even feel the need to try and understand. Seems counterintuitive but it works for me.
If you like Ministry, I'm guessing you probably also like Gravity Kills, Prong, KMFDM, and Pitchshifter (amongst others). Kind of similar. Used to listen to them a bunch back in the day. Should probably try giving them another go.
It’s pleasantly surprising that Ministry is specifically mentioned here! I haven’t always listened to music while working, but when I did, it was almost all Ministry. Very rhythmically mechanical (even for industrial), and driving. I found it great for powering through something I didn’t want to do, or when I was tired. Worked better than caffeine.
I trend towards "progressive" rock music, which is "more music than vocals", but not purely either. As a rule, I don't "listen" to the lyrics, I've never been much for what the songs "mean". I treat the vocals as just yet another instrument in the package.
Prog rock songs also tend to be long, as well as the albums. It's not untoward for me to put an album in the background and have it playing for an entire week. Sometimes I'll stream morow.com, an online prog streaming station.
Currently, I'm hooked on two Genesis concerts, from '87 and '92 at Wembley, that I can't seem to get enough of. I've been playing them solid for over a month off of YouTube. Abacab from the '87 concert is particularly good.
I only played a few samples but it felt more like music to meditate to. Which is great if that's the headspace you like to program in, but I need something with a much faster tempo to keep me engaged in programming.
Same. I've found trailer music [1] works well for me while programming (needs to be relatively upbeat and without words, which I find distracting). You can find a lot of it on spotify.
Some of it sounds like the old ambient genre people were experimenting with in the late 90s early 2ks (perhaps before but thats when i become aware of it). For faster tempo, go dnb.
What I miss most about those collections is that they are browser based, and when I'm programming, if I need the music to stop, or I get a call, or something, I have to go find the tab and manually stop it.
I'm trying to maintain a list of radios in .pls/.m3u format [1], so I can choose how I play them (emacs+mplayer).
- Don't like the current song? m-x kill-radio RET
- Want to store the current name of the song? m-x hit RET
Making the interface as painless as possible is part of what makes music for programming more relaxing to me. I find strange there are not more of those kinds of repos around (I haven't found them)
Sounds like you might be interested in playerctl [0]. I use global shortcuts for its play, pause, next, and previous actions. It has the ability to control Spotify, Firefox and other players. And Firefox media controls work for YouTube, SoundCloud, and even the site this post is about.
I can confirm, I integrated playerctl with my i3 environment, very pleased by it! Especially binding pause with locking my screen, it prevent me to loose track of my current podcast.
The only limitation that I found : if you have multiples media playing, playerctl will interact only with the lastest used one. So when you are running multiples one, you can't stop them all at once.
I'm not a big fan of chrome for a lot of reasons these days, but recent-ish chrome got a feature of a button in the top-right that's present whenever audio is playing somewhere in the browser, that shows all media playing, and that lets you pause/play or move through playlists regardless of the tab you're on.
Using it, I can see what's playing in a youtube tab and pause it while I type this without leaving the tab. If you leave audio paused/stopped long enough though (~a few minutes), it'll stop being accessible through that control and you have to go to the tab you started it in.
I use this a lot when I have 1-2 talks and 2-3 music tabs open, sometimes scattered among 50-80 other tabs.
edit: and I've just confirmed for myself that this control works for content on musicforprogramming.net :)
BTW, since there are links to mp3s here, you could probably dump them into a playlist like the radios.
Browsers do support media controls these days, but that likely excludes the prev/next buttons on most sites—like in this case.
My personal gripe with online music players is that they often don't have volume control and play at ludicrous loudness (ahem), whereas everything audio-playing on my system is adjusted to a certain average volume, and I only make small nudges now and then since we still haven't learned to normalize.
I was pointing out a mistake that inadvertently causes harm. I’m doing it exactly the way I would in a code review. I’m sorry this comes across to you as self righteous, but what I did is absolutely the right thing to do in the face of mistakes like this.
how is what you are doing helping? who could it possibly help?
the comment you responded to was written in english- in this language, the word 'english' can be colloquially understood as meaning 'in terms you understand', as in phrases like 'could you explain that in english?', which is not even the point.
claiming that it is 'absolutely the right thing' to crusade against an entirely abstract 'harm' reeks of one who is "convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrow-mindedly moralistic" -- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-righteous
I contributed $, which gets me access to the "make your own" feature where you can combine their collection of stems any way you like. Now I have the problem where I can easily spend an hour playing with MyNoise to make the best mix for the work I should be doing.
I am experimenting with trying to go in the opposite direction and not listen to music at all. I mean this in the sense of actively trying to get music out of my life completely.
I can't listen to music and sleep or do anything even vaguely productive. It just takes over. It feels more like an addiction to music than something that adds value to my life.
I definitely have a similar thing. Often I’ll listen to music, and then it sort of replaces my usual thought stream, so instead of thinking clearly and consciously, I’m just sort of on autopilot singing a song to myself in my head. I don’t mind that sometimes, but it’s not productive.
One thing that works for me there is music in a language I don't speak. Sure I'll recognise words and will sing along, but I have no idea what I'm saying anyway so its actually not that distracting.
Soundtrack music that you get in movies is designed not to compete with whatever is on screen. I would drop anything with lyrics as that will demand attention from your brain.
I mostly just listen to rain sounds, its super relaxing and it doesn't distract me as much as when "a good song" comes along. Though its a bit odd when its sunny, but it works.
The iPhone app just led to me catching up on a lot of sleep despite being in a noisy hotel room. Being able to EQ the white noise to fine tune it to block specific ambient noises is a game-changing feature.
I'm a big advocate of what might be called mindful or active music listening. Listen to music in the same way that you would watch an interesting movie or read a novel. It's actually kind of bizarre that such a rich artform is so often relegated to background accompaniment for some other task. At first it might feel as though you're wasting time if you're 'only' listening to music without your eyes/hands engaged in something, but I find that goes away if you are actively engaged in the musical narrative.
I have been like this all my life (39 years). When I was a kid my dad used to play us some children LPs. My brother and I sat down to listen to those stories.
As I grew up, I kept actively listening to music, (both classica/baroque that my dad played on CDs or heavy metal music I loved). Same thing happened with TV/movies.
Nowadays, my wife loves to turn on the TV when we are eating just as "background noise" but darn I find it difficult to focus on eaeting/table-conversation vs whatever is in the TV. For me music and TV have always been mindful activities.
>It's actually kind of bizarre that such a rich artform is so often relegated to background accompaniment for some other task
This is so true, and also sad. I used to go to the Gewandhaus Leipzig in Germany to listen to live classical music concert. The appreciation of richness of a lot of music is being lost.
We tend to go more and more towards the opposite though, as it's common to watch netflix and do something else, or listen to a podcast or an audiobook while doing pretty engaging activities like driving or sports. So I don't think it's solely a music thing, it's perhaps just a bit older because the radio has been around for longer than podcasts or youtube. And I can't do most of those things myself (multi-task with artistic stuff).
I'm mostly like you in that I prefer actively listening to things (especially when searching for new things). But revisiting known things without searching for more can also offer different feelings, like a sense of comfort or some mental priming for a mood while you're doing something else. It's two different ways to listen to music for two different kinds of experiences.
As a hobbyist musician, music is often too distracting while I'm coding because I am actively enjoying the nuances of the song. Though, if it's a song I've heard several times already, that can work.
I don't believe Music really aids concentration. Maybe it encourages the worker to stay in the office and work, because it makes the environment more enjoyable overall, and at the cost of less concentration - in my opinion. It is like adding sugar to swallow a bitter medicine
I love Music and art, while I realize it doesn't contribute anything practical to my life. Rather, it is the very thing I live for.
I noticed that when I play league of legends [very competitive game]
I play way worse when I listen to music than when I turn this off
unfortunely this thing is so addictive that I struggle to not listen to anything when working
Impact of music on people is interesting topic I guess
e.g how it affects risk taking - like you know, when there's some more "spiky" "crazier" song like from Disturbed, then I'd say it increases the likehood of taking risk
I've never been a passive music listener. As a child I found muzak in supermarkets and lifts and radio stations in people's cars to be borderline insane. Why would you permit your mind to be occupied by such noise? I found it troubling that nobody shared my perspective.
Later I read in to Buddhism and IIRC it has the same take, essentially if you allow yourself to be subsumed by senses you are displaying laziness. Not denying the aesthetics, these days I am less intellectual and can tolerate some music but it's still pretty grating. I find I can listen to a given piece of music with lyrics precisely once or twice, after which it is intolerable. Music without lyrics or with foreign language lyrics have better staying power, but it's still weak.
I explained to my child this week (while putting on some lute music as a contrast to Chinese string instruments) that in the past there was no recorded music and all music was experienced live. This is often forgotten.
This is one of the strangest things I've ever heard. I understand it, but wouldn't you rather spend time deliberately enjoying something you enjoy rather than stamp it out in the name of raw output?
I personally can't imagine what life would be like without music
Working from home, I've started singing along to pop music I've heard so many times I no longer think about the lyrics. Stuff like Billy Joel, Oasis, The Killers.
I’m not sure what I mean fully by this yet, but I want adaptive music like in video games where it evolves and swells based on how much keyboard input is going on.
No input? Im reading or idle, so calm down the music. Lots of typing? Im coding or documenting and need the tempo to pick up and maybe more instruments to join.
You probably want something slightly different. Fast-slow is one dimension, but pretty strong cognitive psychology research points at complexity (or even cognitive load more precisely, like new genres and off-tempo music). You can mix the two, but you can try fast, complex and new music for coding and see how it goes. It's easy in video games, since games have all the context and 'music too annoying for the fight' gets picked up quite easily in testing, even if someone happens to not know science behind it.
Check out graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law What you would ideally have is a music adapting to changes in your cognitive load - which can be modeled surprisingly easily with even the weakest biofeedback tools, like some smart bands. You know, how you sometimes have to turn off the radio when looking for something while driving, or how stuff is so easy it gets boring to the point where you can't work? Yeah, that's Yerkes-Dodson.
I bounced off that idea when trying to figure out reasonably popular band brand (because they are not trying to help you develop for that hardware) - if someone has any experience with those and likes the idea, absolutely hit me up.
Interesting idea. I sometimes find that when I’ve been concentrating really hard, ‘in the zone’ (whether that’s programming or other cognitive work) I can come out it feeling quite stressed and drained.
So maybe experimenting with the opposite would be valuable for me: pick the tempo up when I’m slow, and then calm me down when I get too into it!
It might be more reflective of the intensity of your coding if you could have it go by depth in a syntactic construct; e.g. for Lisp, number of currently open parentheses. In fact, I now want to implement this — for Emacs, naturally.
From what I've read, shopping music was designed to provide a 15 minute cycle of stimulation and relaxation, as it was thought to increase sales. Rather than following your moods, it could be programmed to enhance your productivity.
But when my kids had those little Nintendo games, I was struck by the idea of having some kind of music that follows me through the ups and downs of life.
Not particularly music for programming but Opera GX Browser [0] inbuilt ambient music does this job. Obviously it is only for in-browser typing though.
I have tried so many music genres and following 2 works for me:
- Film scores (not including the lyrics ones)
- Game music
These I think tries to keep you engaged in the primary action (coding, playing game, or engrossed in movie, reading) without you noticing it too often.
Some repetitive familiar classical music (e.g. Chopin) also does the same to me.
There is also Brain.fm: https://www.brain.fm/ which should use a generated music to help you focus, they also have some research behind it.
I listen to it here and there and it seems to work for me.
I'll second this. I've been a subscriber for a couple years now. What I like specifically is that they allow you to select a context ("Focus", "Relax", "Sleep", or "Meditate") each with several sub-contexts (e.g. "Focus" has "Deep Work", "Creative Flow", "Study & Read", or "Light Work").
It has helped me overcome a lot of distraction in order to get me started on work and keeping me focused once I've gotten started. It's worth the money, in my opinion.
I eagerly checked it out and then realized that they pay model is Subscription - the latest plague of the internet. There are very few things where subscription is appropriate and this is not one of them.
Assuming you like classical, KMFA[0] is a non-profit, listener-supported classical music station that has been broadcasting for over 50 years. They also stream their content for the web 24 hours a day...
As usual, I have to note that this was made by Datashat (aka Datassette), who also has these glorious Businessfunk mixes: http://datassette.net/businessfunk/
Cool site. Personally, when I am coding, I can't really have noise of any kind else I will be distracted and/or irritated. I know some people who always need light music in the background while they are coding. Just never really worked for me.
I tried a lot of "Music for programming" but found out I'm not a fan at all.
My favorite music for programming is the soundtrack from the video game Stellaris[0]. It has the "Interstellar" vibe but less dramatic and more tranquil, making it perfect for programming IMO.
150 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadBut these compilations are perfect - it lets me slip into a state of flow quicker than anything I’ve listened to before or since. It’s not particularly enjoyable in and of itself, but if I’m in a situation where I really need to get something done and focus then it’s my go-to.
Ironically, I hate electronic and techno pump-pump-pump music, but I enjoy chiptunes, specially classic videogame soundtracks. I have to listen to them with earphones, otherwise my colleagues will think I'm playing games instead of working.
I’m French, so listening to a song in english while reading in french is not a problem.
But if I read something in english, then english lyrics will bother me (and vice versa)
KISS and rich lyrical content would be like sunshine in the shade
https://youtu.be/5eG5llG9uoA?t=176
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day
(Actual lyrics)
Prog rock songs also tend to be long, as well as the albums. It's not untoward for me to put an album in the background and have it playing for an entire week. Sometimes I'll stream morow.com, an online prog streaming station.
Currently, I'm hooked on two Genesis concerts, from '87 and '92 at Wembley, that I can't seem to get enough of. I've been playing them solid for over a month off of YouTube. Abacab from the '87 concert is particularly good.
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Its_time_for_adven...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_music
[1] https://www.di.fm
http://djbolivia.blogspot.com/2011/04/music-to-code-by-volum...
A good friend of mine and one of my favorite DJ artist has a nice selection of sets [1] to get you started, let me know if you want more.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/jorineke
I'm trying to maintain a list of radios in .pls/.m3u format [1], so I can choose how I play them (emacs+mplayer).
- Don't like the current song? m-x kill-radio RET
- Want to store the current name of the song? m-x hit RET
Making the interface as painless as possible is part of what makes music for programming more relaxing to me. I find strange there are not more of those kinds of repos around (I haven't found them)
1. https://github.com/kidd/radios
0: https://github.com/altdesktop/playerctl
The only limitation that I found : if you have multiples media playing, playerctl will interact only with the lastest used one. So when you are running multiples one, you can't stop them all at once.
No, they're not... there's an MP3 download link for each of the titles on that page.
Using it, I can see what's playing in a youtube tab and pause it while I type this without leaving the tab. If you leave audio paused/stopped long enough though (~a few minutes), it'll stop being accessible through that control and you have to go to the tab you started it in.
I use this a lot when I have 1-2 talks and 2-3 music tabs open, sometimes scattered among 50-80 other tabs.
edit: and I've just confirmed for myself that this control works for content on musicforprogramming.net :)
Browsers do support media controls these days, but that likely excludes the prev/next buttons on most sites—like in this case.
My personal gripe with online music players is that they often don't have volume control and play at ludicrous loudness (ahem), whereas everything audio-playing on my system is adjusted to a certain average volume, and I only make small nudges now and then since we still haven't learned to normalize.
I find it has the same non-distracting effect
the comment you responded to was written in english- in this language, the word 'english' can be colloquially understood as meaning 'in terms you understand', as in phrases like 'could you explain that in english?', which is not even the point.
claiming that it is 'absolutely the right thing' to crusade against an entirely abstract 'harm' reeks of one who is "convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrow-mindedly moralistic" -- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-righteous
Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1y9GAjuSt8&t=10575s or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm846KdZN_c&t=2604s
Or some minimal techno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WddpRmmAYkg&t=2495s
You can configure it and even calibrate it to your headphones.
I can't listen to music and sleep or do anything even vaguely productive. It just takes over. It feels more like an addiction to music than something that adds value to my life.
Fills the silence, stimulates, but can't hold your attention
MC Solaar, Amadou and Mariam, some k-pop (last played was (G)I-DLE), Onda Vaga… that’s all I can think off off the top of my head.
I've tried it, many times, but it never works.
I don't even like sound-masking headphones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7byVGuWwxIU (remember to turn on captions!)
As I grew up, I kept actively listening to music, (both classica/baroque that my dad played on CDs or heavy metal music I loved). Same thing happened with TV/movies.
Nowadays, my wife loves to turn on the TV when we are eating just as "background noise" but darn I find it difficult to focus on eaeting/table-conversation vs whatever is in the TV. For me music and TV have always been mindful activities.
>It's actually kind of bizarre that such a rich artform is so often relegated to background accompaniment for some other task
This is so true, and also sad. I used to go to the Gewandhaus Leipzig in Germany to listen to live classical music concert. The appreciation of richness of a lot of music is being lost.
I'm mostly like you in that I prefer actively listening to things (especially when searching for new things). But revisiting known things without searching for more can also offer different feelings, like a sense of comfort or some mental priming for a mood while you're doing something else. It's two different ways to listen to music for two different kinds of experiences.
I love Music and art, while I realize it doesn't contribute anything practical to my life. Rather, it is the very thing I live for.
I play way worse when I listen to music than when I turn this off
unfortunely this thing is so addictive that I struggle to not listen to anything when working
Impact of music on people is interesting topic I guess
e.g how it affects risk taking - like you know, when there's some more "spiky" "crazier" song like from Disturbed, then I'd say it increases the likehood of taking risk
Later I read in to Buddhism and IIRC it has the same take, essentially if you allow yourself to be subsumed by senses you are displaying laziness. Not denying the aesthetics, these days I am less intellectual and can tolerate some music but it's still pretty grating. I find I can listen to a given piece of music with lyrics precisely once or twice, after which it is intolerable. Music without lyrics or with foreign language lyrics have better staying power, but it's still weak.
I explained to my child this week (while putting on some lute music as a contrast to Chinese string instruments) that in the past there was no recorded music and all music was experienced live. This is often forgotten.
Now as ever, I tend to program in silence.
I personally can't imagine what life would be like without music
No input? Im reading or idle, so calm down the music. Lots of typing? Im coding or documenting and need the tempo to pick up and maybe more instruments to join.
I’ve found foreign language music and LoFi work fine, I just need to skip songs that aren’t working.
I’d be curious to see if more energetic music when I’m in a lull would speed things up. Musical motivation.
Then funky techno action music when the execution phase commences.
Check out graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law What you would ideally have is a music adapting to changes in your cognitive load - which can be modeled surprisingly easily with even the weakest biofeedback tools, like some smart bands. You know, how you sometimes have to turn off the radio when looking for something while driving, or how stuff is so easy it gets boring to the point where you can't work? Yeah, that's Yerkes-Dodson.
I bounced off that idea when trying to figure out reasonably popular band brand (because they are not trying to help you develop for that hardware) - if someone has any experience with those and likes the idea, absolutely hit me up.
So maybe experimenting with the opposite would be valuable for me: pick the tempo up when I’m slow, and then calm me down when I get too into it!
But when my kids had those little Nintendo games, I was struck by the idea of having some kind of music that follows me through the ups and downs of life.
[1] https://youtu.be/AlY3jsxlzVg
[0] https://www.opera.com/gx
- Film scores (not including the lyrics ones)
- Game music
These I think tries to keep you engaged in the primary action (coding, playing game, or engrossed in movie, reading) without you noticing it too often.
Some repetitive familiar classical music (e.g. Chopin) also does the same to me.
It has helped me overcome a lot of distraction in order to get me started on work and keeping me focused once I've gotten started. It's worth the money, in my opinion.
[0]: https://www.kmfa.org/
Plus the fourth mix for the Near Mint programme: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/near-mint-8th-march-2016-...
Long dubtechno mixes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDsbHKqFcg
Psychedelic / Stoner Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ors0wpcVDcc
My favorite music for programming is the soundtrack from the video game Stellaris[0]. It has the "Interstellar" vibe but less dramatic and more tranquil, making it perfect for programming IMO.
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyH4vonV9j1vPfAgU6wUZ_7A5...