- [1] https://open.spotify.com/album/1R6rh9My8CTK4DqZorJR0V?si=3Ct...
If you have specific song/interpretation recommendations I'd love to hear them.
I laugh (:
But good for you, whatever works. Personally, I can't do music with much lyrics or narrative; I find it distracting.
But to each their own!
These three are very similar to what Defcon sounded like before around 2023 when they started adding more generic hip-hop influenced beats.
Defcon can be alright, but about 25% of their playlist will suddenly take me out of a flow state due to vocals or some obnoxious rhythmic detail.
Personally, I still like these defcon sound bites, even though I've heard them plenty of times. They are part of the atmosphere that the stream wants to create.
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 love listening to it while programming, driving, cooking. :)
I love hacker soundtracks too! I play the OST for Mr Robot and Halt and Catch Fire
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2MjjP5LxjyxA0Vvws3y...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8&list=PLrvyiZ4XwF...
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.
Haven't added anything to it in a while, but over the years I built a youtube playlist of songs that help me focus while working. Generally rules are: predominantly electronic, has some kind of beat, zero vocals. I'm up to over 500 songs at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dTpQwBMaBI&list=PL2A7B99AB9...
> zero vocals
can also be vocals in a language I don't understand. In those cases, the voice is just another instrument and not distracting.
And they have mobile apps :)
Later in the day I listen to more energetic electronic music (a lot of which is from the Hotline Miami soundtrack): M|O|O|N, Dan Terminus, Carpenter Brut, Daniel Deluxe, 1788-L, Pendulum
[1] https://www.discogs.com/master/3779840-Paronator-Flowers-Of-...
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1IKenYEiooONuxxawKtNOm?si=...
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).
My personal favorites are pretty much anything by Nujabes (including the soundtracks for Samurai Champloo), Fat Jon, and DJ Okawari.
I also like some classic albums in the genre like Donuts by J Dilla, Dr. No's Oxperiment by Oh No, and Endtroducing by DJ Shadow.
I will sometimes go through essential charts I find to dive into new genres, and other times I'll pick a random artist and go through their entire discography start to finish.
I highly recommend doing that with Talk Talk, their transition from 80s pop to experimental is phenomenal.
You might also like mood indigo on SoundCloud, mix of house and DnB been a solid programming session soundtrack for me over the last few years.
It really sucks that so much of that catalog is no longer available for all intents and purposes.
ETA: I forgot to mention gorillaz. Great programming music, and seems to give me good ideas.
For the benefit of others, you can stream it here, if you're curious: https://www.thecurrent.org/
before it was a job, I was programming exclusively to trance.fm (sadly gone)
some personal favourites:
- https://musicforprogramming.net/seventyone
(Yes, I'm an only child.)
I was raised in a big family, and I prefer silence when I need truly deep focus. From my experience in open floorplan offices, a majority don't break out the headphones until it gets noisy enough. Some people would even come in early or stay late for exactly this reason.
Boards of Canada
Mr. Robot Original Soundtrack
Very rarely I use custom-filtered (brownish) noise to help with isolation. Perhaps some kind of Ambient or New Age would work too in such situations, but things I like in those genres require attention and not paying it would be absolutely disrespectful.
I listen to all kinds of music at my dayjob but only during specific activities that do not require much contemplation and I can mostly flow with the music and do the work in the background.
Though, I'm a musician and sound engineer, so my relationships with music in general might be a bit special.
I'm a musician too, and a lifelong student and appreciator / afficianado of music across many genres. And I spend hours every workday listening to tracks from my "flowstate" playlist -- which tracks are excluded from my taste profile. Other use cases include music appreciation (close attention for pleasure), education / cultural literacy (close attention for analysis / learning), performance (close attention for reproduction, typically broken into segments / fragments), dancing (mixed attention, emphasis on rhythm and physical movement), relaxation (minimal attention), meditation (minimal attention), mood-setting / socialization (mixed attention), etc.
Judging a piece of music intended for one of these categories based solely on whether it's "worth listening to" or "[demanding of] respect" in the context of the wrong category will leave you impoverished in the other areas.
EDIT: P.S. That doesn't mean tolerating muzak! I recommend curating playlists limited to tracks that you can appreciate in a given appropriate, narrowed context. For example, here's my "flowstate" playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA
-- which bears almost no relation to my favorite artists or the kind of music I make.
It is pretty much ideal for, as Larry Wall once said, letting music "wash over you" while coding https://youtu.be/SKqBmAHwSkg?si=_vHvP8Ij9lacwhFk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnk_b_7trII
This is an extended edition of "it might just be a one shot deal" from the waka/jawaka album by Frank Zappa. The extended part is the pedal steel played by Sneaky Pete Kleinow.
If you have never heard any Zappa stuff and this is interesting to you, listen to waka jawaka itself if you like instrumentals. If you want something more commercial, listen to the Apostrophe/Overnite Sensation album. If you want more odd, listen to the Bongo Fury album, featuring Captain Beefheart. Happy exploring.
Johann Johannsson and Max Richter are my go-tos.
After that, one can build up a list of hundreds of net radio stations in VLC and find one that works for you -today-.
OPs playlist requires too many faculties used in coding.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAb7rS-Wvyr0AZdUlgaCg...
But when I need to mix it up, I switch to FIP (Paris). They manage several different stations, but start with the main one first. It's excellently curated with more of a global palette than your typical station.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLscdEjM7jiUsxRPIt7BUjzxpA...
Lately it’s been a mix of ambient electronic and lo-fi, especially for longer deep work sessions.
https://archive.org/details/IlluminationRadio
Pick an episode with your rng of choice.
- Pure Shakuhachi music (ignore the ones with 'relaxing' background music)
- Brian Eno
- Vangelis
- Hiroshi Yoshimura
(but usually progressive trance with no lyrics is my preference)
There are usually no lyrics, there's an absolute ton out there, and something about the music gets my brain flowing better than other instrumental music.
French hip-hop/rap to clean head while walking under rain.
Speed metal for for LLMing.
Heavy Metal for actual development
Bossa Nova for deploying at 1 am
