Be careful. Music engages your creative hemisphere. This doesn't matter much if what you're doing is a simple, repetitive task. But if you're trying to design or program, it might kill your ability to "think outside the box" and invent creative solutions.
In my case, listening to music while programming has a very pronounced effect: I will spend 30 minutes crafting a function that will do something. The function will eventually work. And then I will stop listening to music and several minutes later notice that the function was entirely unnecessary, because I can make an architectural or data structure change instead and avoid writing the function altogether. This is something I am unable to do while listening to music.
Once I noticed this, I started being careful: I'd listen to music while configuring routers, but not when planning and designing the changes. You get the idea.
So, before you start listening to music while working, I'd advise you to check if your brain works the same way (the effect might not be exactly the same for everyone).
These days I mostly use natural sounds (the Naturespace app for iOS is great) and good headphones to mute background noise.
I prefer silence, but since the open-plan fad holds sway here, I've found rain to be the most effective substitute. The best rain track I've found so far is 57 at http://archive.org/details/Sounds_of_Nature_Collection
Check out gordon hempton: http://soundtracker.com/
He makes fantastic binaural nature recordings. The advantage of binaural recordings is that they have an amazing feeling of "space" so that you forget that you are wearing headphones and that you aren't sitting in a forest. I've made some of my own as well. https://soundcloud.com/moultano
When exposed to noise for prolonged periods of time, sometime in the middle noise becomes silence. You don't feel there is noise, unless some turns it off or increases/decreases a little.
Its called conditioning the mind.
Its a bit like the right pane in eclipse, In years I never remember using it even once, yet its absence will irritate me.
Ever get that feeling sometimes when you are surrounded by people in a noisy place and yet after sometime sort of don't even feel that is disturbance.
I strongly agree with this. Even if it's only ambient music (mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872706), I still use it only for situations involving mundane things like documentation. Otherwise I greatly prefer silence.
My SO though, is exactly the opposite. She just can't get any work done in silence, and needs relatively fast music with vocals. Although it does need to be music that she's already familiar with, otherwise she gets distracted by having to listen to the lyrics.
I absolutely can't handle lyrics. I think you're right. Those of us who remember using gopher protocol probably grew up listening to radio hits even if we bought the tape or CD, so it was known and in its own way monotonous. But served the purpose of drowning out my brothers or roommate.
Now I don't own a TV and rarely listen to radio, and my tastes have dramasticly broadened, so I almost never listen to the same song more than a handful of times. I find lyrics are a show stopper. Even overly ambitious classical, jazz, electronica trips me up.
Here's a playlist I've been listening to for a while, seeded by, of all things, gopro surf videos, which has become my go-to study set, usually fed in with Bose QC-15s
For me, 'white noise' - type sounds- sounds of rainfall, waves, etc. [1]- help me focus. I usually work with nothing, bu one day when working in a noisy environment I discovered that putting headphones on and listening to 'sound of nature' tracks worked very well. So well, in fact, that now when I get stuck or am just having trouble focusing for any reason I do this.
[1] I think this is called 'brown noise' these days.
Not with the ones I'm familiar with (Bose QC-15). You have to turn the headphones on to engage the 'active' noise cancellation, but you don't have to be listening to anything. In fact, you can unplug the cable from the ear piece completely and still hear (not hear?) the effect.
Brown noise helps me concentrate a fair bit. Personally, I've got SimplyNoise generating brown noise in oscillation mode which sounds a bit like waves.
They are engineering terms, not marketing terms. The 'colors' are to give you an analogy of sound frequencies in the spectrum: White is a blend of all (audio) frequencies with equal intensities; with pink noise, the intensity falls off at higher frequencies (1/f), and with brown noise the intensity falls off faster at higher frequencies (1/f^2).
> I still use it only for situations involving mundane things like documentation.
I'm sorry, documentation requires less concentration?
I find (I hypothesize) that because I'm doing something which balances the hemispheres more (and requires me to get inside the head of my user) music doesn't work for documentation, it's too distracting. Programming yes, ambient works well, but writing...
For me, at least, that's true. But then, I've written a lot of words in my life.
Now, I will plan the documentation away from music, and I'll edit it away from a computer, but music gives you a "permission to suck" and just get words on the paper. Once you have words on the paper, you have something that can be molded.
I second this, writing good documentation is harder than writing code. I can do both with music I already know, however, but I will sometime go for a walk or a cigarette, both help a lot.
"During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while they worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each
group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical selection.Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming problem to work out from specification. To no one's surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by music —there's another brain center that listens to the music.
The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild
card. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room."
(I hope this still counts as fair-use)
The whole part "Creative Space" is longer than my excerpt, so if you have access to Peopleware I recommend reading all of it.
This precise statement is easily verified (just google it). But I thought I had a source for the "listening to music hampers your creative ability" statement, and I can't seem to find it.
You could reason that if you engage the brain with something, then it cannot do another thing at the same time. So if you engage the areas responsible for creative thought processes, these areas will not be available for other tasks.
Obviously this might not be the same for everyone, I'm just cautioning people and urging everyone to do some testing.
Another example is that many people (including myself) can't dictate, for the same reasons. In my case, whenever I use dictation, I later go back and re-read what I wrote and it is always disappointing. It seems the areas of my brain that process speech are also needed to form thoughts into sentences and I just can't do both well.
No, I don't think you can reason that. The brain is engaged in so many simultaneous activities that it is nearly impossible to count or even categorize them. Our understanding of how we think is very poor, and the brain very robust. Moreover, brains and minds are so variable that exception is the rule. Talking about what works for you and making something that helps you (and may help others) is great, but framing it with dubious extrapolations is, I think, misleading.
It's a matter of practice. I've seen quadriplegics do dictation just fine. You just have to train yourself to think a different way. This may not be an efficient use of your time. (I find that I can do dictation, but it takes much more effort than typing.)
For me, the key is to not listen to new music whilst trying to do creative work. If I'm listening to an album that I have been listening to for the last 6 months, it can be the perfect foil to the incredibly noisy open plan offices I have worked in for the last 15 years of my career (managers, for goodness sake please stop making open plan offices!)
Nothing beats the overriding hum of a server room though - Pure white noise at loud enough volumes that you can't talk easily with other people. Stick some ear plugs in to dampen the volume a little, and you're set to go.
my brian works the other way around:
i cant be creative in silence. I need to listen to music but the music has to be without vocals. if there are vocals that i understand i to much focus on the vocals.
I talked about some other Coders about that. About 20 People.
The strange thing was that 7 need music that pump them up like rock or something like that. 7 need relaxing/chillout music( iam in that group) and 6 of them need silence.
So i think there is no general way of what you can listen or not to.
Most pop or classical music demands your attention; you'll pay good money to go to a concert where you sit in a chair and pay attention for a prolonged period. Dance/trance/techno provides high energy as a driver of activity, not a focus; you'll go to an event (dance) to focus on the activity, with the music as background motivation. Hence I listen to trance podcasts, getting the push and occupying a busy-but-unrelated-to-programming part of my brain, while also drowning out background noise (factory, sales guy on phone at next desk, ...).
I think it depends on the type of music you listen to. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uCL1_YcRwk is always able to get me to stop thinking about other things and concentrate on the task at hand. I notice I do much, much better on exams when I listen to music (esp. jazz) while I'm studying; perhaps it blocks out all other thoughts, focusing my attention on the core material that is really required for maximum productivity and retention.
>Be careful. Music engages your creative hemisphere. This doesn't matter much if what you're doing is a simple, repetitive task. But if you're trying to design or program, it might kill your ability to "think outside the box" and invent creative solutions.
Studies might suggest so, but irl programmings have been creating very cool stuff with music blazing from the speakers.
I've noticed the same effect but kind of the other way around. When I'm doing programming that requires thinking outside the box and creativity, music is ANNOYING and disruptive.
I love listening to music while pixel juggling UI's or fixing bugs but as soon as I start working on a scheduling algorithm or something similar I have to turn the music off.
Personally, I frequently switch between music and silence. Putting on some music stokes my motivation and productivity, getting me started on a task. As soon as I hit a problem that requires more brainpower, I hit pause to let myself think—just like turning down the music in your car so you can parallel park.
I am curious why something engaging your creative brain would prevent you from being creative - I would think it would do the opposite? *edit: Did you mean to say it "can kill your ability to think outside the box"?
I presume the idea is that with music engaging that portion of the brain, it's not able to work on other things that require creativity. It's essentially burning cycles that could be used for something else (and I know that's a horrible analogy).
Kind of like how (for me, at least!) it's nearly impossible to effectively read and have a conversation at the same time as they are using the same language part?
Another good one is soundtracks - personally I like futuristic stuff (Deus Ex: HR soundtrack, or Mass Effect, or Person of Interest), as they are designed not to detract from the point of focus.
Lastly, luvstep/liquid dubstep type things are quite vapid but listen-able.
> I've always found myself to be most productive when listening to repetitive electronic music - it motivates but also doesn't distract you too much.
Yup, goa-trance for me :)
Music with a lot of lyrics is most distracting to me, though I've found it also depends on the particular way the vocals are mixed/mastered, on some albums they're much harder to ignore than others. Lyrics in my native tongue (Dutch) are hardest to ignore, but even music in a foreign language I don't understand at all (say, the xxx rottweiler hundar, Icelandic hiphop) is more distracting than something (almost) purely instrumental.
Thanks, I am already aware :) Two recent finds on that site I've been listening to a lot are Mindsphere - Inner Cyclone (old school melodic goa) and Pavel Svimba - Space Babuska (real crazy, poppy psy, reminds of Haltya, some great mixing/mastering, way too distracting for this thread though :) ).
This site shows that it is in fact possible to offer great quality music online for free & legal download. I'm frankly amazed actually, just how it can be. These producers must love their craft so much.
Oh, Tron Legacy OST is the thing! You could also try Doctor Who soundtrack from season 5 and 6, it can do wonders, but sometimes you have to skip at track or two (as they are just too good and make you drop everything you are doing and listen)
Bastion OST is nice too!
"... two out of three of people like to listen to music while they work, study or read but it’s difficult to find and manage music that consistently works well for this purpose."
Precisely! I like to listen to ambient music when working and constantly trying to find new music for this purpose is quite a hassle.
I use all songs available on Spotify by In Flames. It's mostly melodic and rhythmic, usually upbeat, and the vocals and the higher spectrum percussion drown out ambient discussions without being very thought-provoking in themselves.
Hello there metal fans, I enjoy tuning in people's MDM broadcasts on Grooveshark. With suggestions its a nice mix of background music you don't have to manage and occasional song that you would like to hear.
Yes yes! I'm a fan of Metallica but I can only listen Kill'em'All while programming. Either that or repetitive ambient/instrumental/chill-out without vocals.
Big fan of SomaFM for work. They have some great xmas stations that come out in December, if you like. SomaFM did stress me out a bit with their constant requests for donations. They made it sound like they were being shut down any day, yet they're still here. I donated, by the way. Didn't stop the cries for help though.
last.fm is great for this. Type in an artist/genre you like and for the next few hours while you work, you will discover plenty of new ones as their radio service works by molding a 'radio service' to your taste.
76:14 by Global Communication is an undisputed classic of the genre, however you might find it distracting because it's so good.
And of course there's Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which should go without saying really. Again, you might not be able to work because it's such a good record. Also, it's not ambient in the sense of having no beats. If you've never heard it before you should probably just stop working right now and listen to it. Also he did a SAW vol. 2 album which is more beatless, but it's not as good.
You can't go wrong with Future Sound of London. It's a bit dystopian, but utterly amazing stuff.
The "minimalist" (he hates that word) work of composer Steve Reich is also very good for zoning out. All the other people in the modern "ambient" genre are ripping him off to some extent or another. I suggest starting with Electric Counterpoint.
EDIT - some more:
Hecq - 0000
Almost anything by The Orb, especially The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Make sure you get the proper UK version not the cut down US release.
Should point out that it's Lifeforms by FSOL that you should be listening to. The later stuff isn't so ambient. Whatever that means.
Listening to it again now. Classic. Here they are in full effect back when that album was recorded. The CGI is all them as well. It's all very demoscene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__tAx6-Fo6g
Those were the days. And to be fair looking at tumblr now, they've kinda made good on their promise.
I don't find it surprising, especially for someone that is already a musical prodigy. I remember dreaming of beautiful melodies as a kid, but lacking musical talent, I was unable to play them on a musical instrument. Thus, the melodies were just stuck in my head and usually forgotten shortly after waking up.
The thing is, RDJ is legendary for self-mythologising. As a result of this, everyone else mythologises him too. He's obsessed with messing with his fans' heads. He has openly stated in interviews that he lies about himself all the time.
To be fair he could have written that stuff as a teenager. But then maybe he also owns one of Kraftwerk's original vocoders, modified to produce output in Cornish.
Apparently he also has a lookalike that walks around at his shows to divert the attention of fans.
http://di.fm is great for electronic music, they've got plenty of channels. Try also searching youtube, and if you find anything you like, use the "youtube mix", it's automatically generated but usually contains a lot of similar songs.
That is absolutely amazing. I am so in love with Carbon Based Lfieforms right now.
I'm terrible at music genres myself, but I am a huge fan of Bonobo's music. It's classified as trip-hop - no idea if that falls under this category.
Bonobo - Black Sands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTjF2_-bneM the entire album is amazing
To concentrate, I use computer game soundtracks (e.g. from Humble Bundle; particularly the one with Eufloria and Waking Mars), and to drown out voices of coworkers whose volume dial got lost in the laundry, text-heavy music in a language I don't understand (alternating between Czech hip-hop and Finnish hummpa).
I regularly the Fez soundtrack by Disasterpeace, and musicforprogramming();[0] has quite a few ones (esp. 06 and 08) that "just work" with my brain and make me zoom right into the zone in seconds. Also, This Binary Universe by BT.
On the advice of coffitivity, I've turned to human environments for ambient noise. I've been blessed with library access to the BBC sound effects library. http://www.sound-ideas.com/sound-effects/bbc-41-60-cds-sound... Some are the typical sfx fare, but the latter half is of city streets from around the world.
SoundTransit http://turbulence.org/soundtransit/index.html has interesting field recordings all under the CC BY 2.0 license. If you "Book a Transit," it compiles an mp3 of several different field recordings, taking you from city to city. You can also search the database or just browse the collection.
Agreed and same. I have a playlist on my phone for just trance which gets listened to whenever I'm working or even exercising.
I noticed something really interesting - your pace adjusts to the beat. For example, I took my headphones off to take a call and I was in awe at the speed of the beat, which only 2 minutes ago sounded fairly regular and not as fast.
When I was working for my math exams, having to learn dozens of demonstrations by heart, I have a playlist composed of 6 hours of remixes of satisfaction, by Benni Benassi.
Amazing how 6 hours can look like 30 minutes when you listen to the same, repititive music :).
Yup, trance and house for me, definitely. Trance and house are like productivity crack. I listen to trance when I'm working and house when I'm working out.
Wow. This seems like a great and interesting product...
But it also seems like the kind of thing any programmer with a decent music collection could throw together as an MVP in a couple of weekends (ignoring music distribution rights, of course).
But it's got quite the large team of people behind it -- I'm very curious to see if this can monetize well. It just seems like such a "niche" product -- like it should be just another channel on Pandora, instead of a whole company in its own right. Seeing that margins on music streaming are generally already so low, I wish I could see their monetization strategy...
Once upon a time Red Alert (1), one of first RTS games, won Game Music of the Year award from multiple magazines.
I was initially a bit puzzled by it: there's nothing in the music that immediately jumps at you as great. It's nice, it resembles Nine Inch Nails in some places, that's it. But then I noticed I can listen to it for extended lengths of time without problem. It's relatively subtle, and it grows on you. It doesn't resemble the "epic" movie-style soundtracks that are so common these days.
And I guess that's the point... ? Game music, especially in replayable games like RTS, need to be good in the long run or it inevitably ends up being turned off in game settings. "Epic" music makes good first impression, and in trailers, but it's short-sighted in the long run.
I'm arguing along these lines on Age of Wonders 3 forums (upcoming fantasy TBS game similar to Heroes of Might and Magic), but without success.
The SimCity4 soundtrack is really awesome for just hacking away at things. I think that the Red Alert soundtrack is one of the best "get shit done" albums I've had in my box for a while, even with the amazingly cheesy synths and 90s style. The Descent and System Shock 2 soundtracks were very much in this vein (SS1 was procedurally generated, so it's hit or miss).
I think the big trick is that game music is meant to get you thinking and active, but not distract you.
Doesn't work for me, i can't concentrate with this music..
I'm not sure if this will even work for a broader range or people because music is so much subjective..
For me it totally depends on the mood what music i can work best with, but usually it's some electronic house music where i can concentrate best.
This was created using paulstretch [1], a program to transform normal audio using extreme stretches. I've tried it on a few songs I liked and it does really an excellent jobs of creating extremely fluid ambiances.
The triple parentheses on the first video is a nod to Sunn O))) [2], an American drone / noise / ambient metal band which features super long songs with droning saturated guitars (playing on vintage cranked up to 11 Sunn Model T amps) and usually no drums. One of my favorite songs from them and perhaps one of the best introduction to their music for the non-initiated is titled Alice [3], though perhaps it's not as representative of their music as, say, Ra at Dusk [4]. (Sunn O))) was heavily influenced by the pioneer drone metal band Earth, and their mindblowing album Earth²: special low frequency version [5]).
Minor detail someone might not know: a part of the Inception soundtrack (which is also great ambient) was made with that technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVkQ0C4qDvM
Those who have seen the movie and its plot device will know why this is a brilliant idea on so many levels.
To each his/her own music needed to concentrate.
The ambient sounds help me to get stuff done in the mornings, as a wake up :)
During long coding-nights I'd rather go for Tech-house livesets that can be found all over soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/tags/tech-house
I think this is one of the few perks not beeing a English native speaker: I do understand lyrics if I concentrate but otherwise I hear the voice just as another instrument.
So I can listen to nearly any music for progrmaming. One of my favourites is Origin - Antithesis. But really everything works.
I'm a big fan of electronic music and the craft of DJing, and my favorite type of music to listen to while coding is UK Bass and its various subgenres. For this, I get my fix from the online "pirate-style" radio station, http://sub.fm, which has live DJs and an IRC chatroom where you can chat with the DJ and other fans. It's really great.
Note that this type of music is different from more mainstream (and American) dubstep—it has a deeper, more ambient quality to it. Great coding music.
Recently, I've also discovered a similar radio station for ambient music: http://stillstream.com/
Link was posted on here a while back but is still the go to solution for me. Pretty well curated list of trance style stuff. Also has a fast and slow option.
Comprised of classical music scores from some of the best movies, it creates the perfect ambience for coding, which stays out of your way, yet soothes and calms you while enhancing your productivity. Can't get enough of this mix.
I've had really good luck with certain kinds of minimalist music. In particular, Simeon Ten Holt's "Canto Ostinato" seems to actively help me focus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDCsOL2vBJc
Most performances are well over an hour, so a nice little side benefit is that you don't have to spend much time picking and changing music.
I like the idea but right now I have no connectivity on this app.
So far I've been using raining.fm because chamber music sometimes slows down and quiets so I can hear my co-workers.
My goal is to shut out what everyone is saying, but not the fact that they're talking. So far raining.fm has been perfect, but the only small downside is that when you take the headphones off it feels like you stepped out of a space shuttle or something.
Interesting. I've seen a few similar submissions here that play ambient/focus music. To me, a product or service like this has to provide enough goodies to sway me from the convenience of a simple Spotify playlist, seeing as that is the go-to choice for many.
If you can strike a balance between creating helpful productivity customization and keeping it simple, something like this could really takeoff.
I noticed a while ago that some music needs active listening[1], while other kinds[2] don't distract me.
1 - Rock, various kinds of progressive music, anything with nontrivial melody
2 - ambient, more monotonous music, music with uniform volume
I'd love to say I've started dividing my music collection according to this criteria - but I've been too lazy so far. Sorry about that. I'll try once again.
Have been using this for about two months now. Never really listened to music while working before, for some reason it always ended up distracting me (the kind of music I like anyway).
But with this, I can actually concentrate just fine. Can't really tell if it helps, but at least it's nice music that doesn't get in the way, good enough for me :)
It's different for everyone and you should try out different things. For me, a 2 disc collection of Willie Nelson helps the most since it is a moderate tempo and I have heard it so many times that it is not distracting. Also, when the 2 CDs are done, I know that I should stand up and stretch.
This is a great little service. I have a "concentrate" playlist in spotify that tries to fill this need with classical music, but I listen to it in the background so much that even with a fairly long playlist I get tired of hearing the same songs. Will definitely be trying this out.
I've realized that it doesn't matter so much what I listen to but rather how much. The more often I hear a song / album whilst working the better it helps me to focus. For a while now this has been pink floyds pulse concert from 1994.
For me, songs without lyrics work best, doesn't matter if it is classical or instrumental techno like Nine Inch Nail's "Ghosts". Songs with vocals that I've heard a lot are better than songs with vocals that I've never heard before, presumably because my brain isn't trying as hard to process the words as it would be if I hadn't heard them as much... but songs with no vocals at all are the best for focus, IME.
I'm deeply in love with Zoe Keating's work. She's a cellist who composes and records her own music, building compositions using a looper. It's beautiful stuff, and I find it perfect for coding.
But... isn't this exactly like the sound I'm trying to block (coworkers talking!) ? :)
[edit] I just read on their page that their theory is "It's pretty hard to be creative in a quiet space". So while I like the "hotel lobbby" feel for some kinds of work, I disagree that silence is bad.
OTOH, this might work for me because I can't parse engilsh that well.
No, coworkers walking is distracting because I can hear and understand what they are saying. My mind gets interested and will try to listen. For me it's the same with music that has pronounced lyrics.
I'm a little confused (though the service looks nice and works well). Do people not have their own music they prefer to listen to, or a dozen other ways to stream customized channels?
The best sound to help me concentrate would be some sort of ultrasonic repellent to keep people out of my office (unless absolutely necessary, of course!)
In my case, listening to music while programming has a very pronounced effect: I will spend 30 minutes crafting a function that will do something. The function will eventually work. And then I will stop listening to music and several minutes later notice that the function was entirely unnecessary, because I can make an architectural or data structure change instead and avoid writing the function altogether. This is something I am unable to do while listening to music.
Once I noticed this, I started being careful: I'd listen to music while configuring routers, but not when planning and designing the changes. You get the idea.
So, before you start listening to music while working, I'd advise you to check if your brain works the same way (the effect might not be exactly the same for everyone).
These days I mostly use natural sounds (the Naturespace app for iOS is great) and good headphones to mute background noise.