This site is a gem that has accompanied me on many spikes in the last year :) datasette's original music is top tier too. cognitively stimulating but not attention stealing.
Don't laugh, but for me, it's Abba. Their entire discography is ~3 hours which is how long I can maintain peak concentration. Their songs are consistently good so that I don't need to skip a song, but not too good that I would stop working and start listening. Plus I've never heard Abba song in any good movie so it doesn't remind me scenes from a movie I would want to rewatch. Of course I don't listen to it every day, only when I really need to, most daily programming tasks can be done with any music.
I recently discovered Lorn and have been mainlining his back catalogue ever since whilst working. Thoroughly interesting and immersive yet not distracting.
I remember downloading music from the hacking e-show “The Scene” way back when - must have been late 2000s? Some great music in there like Newborn Butterflies if I remember the name right. It was nice background music in the show and I’d put it on from time to time.
Shoutout to SomaFM's Defcon Radio which has been my go-to programming music for years now. Not too dissimilar to the stuff found on this site. https://somafm.com/defcon/
Could not love SomaFM more! The past few xmas holiday seasons I've been streaming "Department Store Christmas" which is hugely wacky retro Christmas music. Somehow I'd never heard "What Ever Happened to Christmas" a Jimmy Webb song made famous by Frank Sinatra. It was kind of life changing.
The soundtracks for SimCity 3000, 4, and the 5th one titled just "SimCity" are written specifically to be played while doing some fiddly micromanagement tasks.
This seems focused on one very particular taste in music of droning semi-random lo-fi synthesizers. I find this unlistenable without any kind of percussion.
Totally, give me Power Metal, or even whatever Rammstein is at any time, if there is no percussion I find it either too relaxing or it will get on my nerves, no middle ground.
As someone else mentioned, I had a "Programming" playlist that has barely changed in 20 years (small additions here and there) and mine tend yo be "uplifting" type of music (if that makes sense).
I'm well aware that I'm in the minority, but I have never been able to focus on anything - especially programming - other than in absolute, total silence.
I’ve thought about and experimented with it a lot. The main criteria is no lyrics, or at a minimum lyrics in a language you don’t understand at all, since this hijacks attention from parts of the brain useful for programming in a noticeable way. I find prominent fast percussion seems to help with focus but I am less confident of that.
Most other elements don’t seem to matter too much. Baroque, industrial, ambient, etc are all effectively equivalent in most regards.
That said, I tend to lean toward 1990s atmospheric drum-and-bass (pretty much anything released by Good Looking Records) as a good default. That genre maximizes things that seem to help while minimizing things that seem to detract.
This may be weird.. but I have been listening to a bunch of extended "save room" ambient tracks based on music in Resident Evil.. Someone under the name of Survival Spheres has a crapload of these on YT-music.. They are all about 10-12 mins long.. and they stay of the way mentally..
>> I've had three main tracks that I've used for the past 8 months or so.
I've had several dozen songs (grown from ~5 in 1998) that I've used for almost 28yrs. They were originally mp3s, eventually cds, then apple music. I'm glad the artists have been getting royalties on the songs, i play them on loop sometimes for hours a day for decades on.
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[ 4860 ms ] story [ 3172 ms ] threadsome personal favourites:
- https://musicforprogramming.net/seventyone
- https://musicforprogramming.net/fiftyseven
- https://musicforprogramming.net/fortysix
As someone else mentioned, I had a "Programming" playlist that has barely changed in 20 years (small additions here and there) and mine tend yo be "uplifting" type of music (if that makes sense).
(Yes, I'm an only child.)
Most other elements don’t seem to matter too much. Baroque, industrial, ambient, etc are all effectively equivalent in most regards.
That said, I tend to lean toward 1990s atmospheric drum-and-bass (pretty much anything released by Good Looking Records) as a good default. That genre maximizes things that seem to help while minimizing things that seem to detract.
The first one is a 1-hour mix of "In Motion" from the soundtrack to The Social Network: https://youtu.be/bCxPmMbZjuk
The second is a 1-hour mix of "It Has to be This Way" from the soundtrack to Metal Gear Rising Revengance: https://youtu.be/jKGDib6qZBo
The third is a 1-hour mix of "Clock Tower" from the soundtrack to Dead Cells: https://youtu.be/plwhysPCxXI
I've had several dozen songs (grown from ~5 in 1998) that I've used for almost 28yrs. They were originally mp3s, eventually cds, then apple music. I'm glad the artists have been getting royalties on the songs, i play them on loop sometimes for hours a day for decades on.
I love listening to it while programming, driving, cooking. :)