Ask HN: What music do you listen to while working?

Lo-fi girl livestream on youtube.

BBC Radio 1 Anthems

Tycho

I recently moved away from music to using brown noise and it has proven far more effective at helping me stay in a focused state.

But one trick I learned back in my college days that worked well was to play a single song on loop. It doesn’t really matter what the song is, though ideally it is something you enjoy (though not one of your favorites as you don’t want to wear yourself out on it). After a loop or two your brain gets used to it and it goes in the background and you stop noticing it.

House music, drum and bass, ambient, breaks, acid trance, a bit of world music and some game soundtracks. I have about 800 songs on several playlists.

There's something about S.U.N. Project and Infected Mushroom that really gets me in the zone.

I also really like most of Aim to the Head Mixes[1] on YouTube

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAWykzoREYA

Lately: Cigarettes After Sex for some reason... Before I never thought I'd listed to music with lyrics while coding. But apparently things do change sometimes... Go figure.

btw, before it was mainly chillstep mixes from YT or Spotify... I still listen to this stuff here and there.

Ear plugs. The ones people use in factories not to go deaf.

Might sound weird, but for me it's Metal.

Plug for SOMAFM https://somafm.com super old internet radio stations. Drone Zone is great for concentration.

I usually play some rain sounds from https://lifeat.io, Lily Pond is my favorite.

Play the rain noise and some music with no lyrics at a fairly low volume, and it really works well.

Taylor Swift.

I'd say anything non-vocal usually works really well for me. If there are vocals, it's acceptable if they are effectively used as an incoherent musical instrument.

Music that tries to sing me a complex English narrative is too distracting to work as background material. Rammstein is one example of a clever workaround, since I don't understand German.

Two Steps From Hell https://youtu.be/9O4_awEHh1g and similar things

Some albums of Electric Universe

“Alexa, start my day” begins streaming of the local classical music station. I used to listen to music with lyrics, but it got to be a distraction at times.

It really depends, different musical dimensions work on different days. A big distinction for me is between quiet music and loud music. One new artist on my rotation in the quiet music category is Jose Miguel Moreno, Spanish Guitar/Lute/etc. He has recorded some pieces composed in the 1500-1700s that are so spare, so direct- musically intricate but lacking the all encompassing change-your-personality noise that modern audio producing techniques make possible. Love the calm his playing induces.

Lately, some of the chiller shows from cercle. E.g. [1]

Before that, lots of post-rock sprinkled with some infected mushroom according to my mood that day

--- 1: https://youtu.be/mKhQwfiDAfs

Death Metal.

Ozric Tentacles. Never any lyrics and huge back catalog on YouTube.

NYTimes article about the authors, written in 2011: https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/...

Drone works best for me. Stuff like Phill Niblock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcdcWWcjBKg

Just to add something different to the replies, I listen to a lot of rap, hip hop, indie and instrumental metal.

I used to use YouTube but it's a bit distracting for me so I have created a 6 hour playlist that I hope to make 20 hours

Regardless of the genre, adding gentle rain in the background makes it all easy to focus to.

I have been enjoying Nier Automata's game soundtrack recently. EDM, Porter Robinson and related is also a favorite of mine. Citypop, jpop, latin pop, and kpop all help too. The music feels familiar but I don't get distracted by the words because I don't speak the languages well or at all.

When I need to focus for a long time, I put on a live performance of an artist I like and know the songs of. Daft Punk's Alive 2007, Porter Robinson's Worlds, and Yo Yo Ma's performance at the 2015 BBC Proms of Bach's Cello Suites are my main three. DJ Sets from things like Ultra, EDC, Coachella, BBC Radio One are nice as because the songs flow really well from one to the next.

I found that slowing down music has helped it be less distracting to me. Not all music will sound good, but slowed classical generally does. 75% to 80% speed playback of the Cello Suites is really nice.

I am enamored with, what feels like, youtube originated genres. "Dark Academia" is a vibe and playlist genre that has helped me discover a lot more classical and adjacent music. I enjoy the playlist titles and creative writing in the comments too.

When coding, I enjoy super long deep house sets, they have minimal vocals, and a set can be hours of consistent uninterrupted music with a constant pattern or time signature. Drowns out everything else

Service: BrainFM.

Bands: 36, Marconi Union, ...

Genres: classical, jazz