This. 100% this. Although, there are times, particularly when deep-diving into someone else's trainwreck, where you know that futility and defeat are the order of the day, when I'll put on Godspeed! You Black Emperor's "Dead Flag Blues":
The car's on fire, there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides.
I've found when doing network pentesting there's a very different set of music that works well for me compared to web app pentesting. For network testing I tend to start with movie soundtracks before moving up to rock instrumentals like east Hastings then on to harder and harder rock/metal before hitting cradle of filth.
On web app tests I normally find plaid or other ambient electronica works better for me.
For coding I find that swing, jazz and blues works best. I've been listening to a lot of cab Calloway of late which is mostly instrumental or scat focused. If theres too much by way of lyrics or if it's too catchy it tends to disrupt my concentration though.
I'd upvote this 10 times if I could. In some cases, I have to even drop music that has interesting beats, because I start trying to find patterns, listening intently to the beats, etc.
What I've found to deal with this is 2 of SomaFM's channels:
Drone Zone and Space Station Soma
Turn those up on some noise-cancelling headphones and lock out everything else. Good times.
From talking to people over the years, I've been surprised how differently people interpret music. There's a big split between the lyric driven and the lyric deaf.
People talk to me about the lyrics to songs I know and I have no idea what they're on about. I can listen to, and even sing, songs whose lyrics I've never verbally parsed. So I get on great with songs that sound good but have idiotic or nonsensical lyrics (Phoenix or The Smashing Pumpkins, for example) because I don't interpret them anyway. I have to listen deliberately and with full attention to "get it."
I find this interesting as well. It's a rare song that I like /because/ of the lyrics (or even despite the lyrics). For the most part they are just part of the music - another instrument adding complexity to the song.
Despite that, I can't really program while listening to songs with lyrics. Somewhere in my brain a thread is running parsing the lyrics and stealing cycles.
If it helps color in my picture a bit, I go to sleep listening to (spoken) podcasts every night. I can be asleep in minutes even listening to reasonably interesting content. I suspect this will bite me in the ass if I ever decide to go back to university ;-)
yah, a friend of mine claims that he listens to 'death metal' while coding - I don't believe that.Personally I go for 'Raag Deshkar' - Indian Classical Music. it's just amazing for productivity and if you want to feel like it's morning. (There are particular time every 'raag' should be played
Yeah, I listen to music without words while coding or typing. I'm listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack right now.
However, if I'm browsing/wasting time online/working out at the gym/running, I definitely prefer stuff like hiphop to keep me entertained. I think this is because these are more passive tasks.
Interesting. I can't listen to classical music when coding. I think it's because I'm used to listening to that particular style actively rather than passively as I'm used to with most music.
i can listen to trance / electronic music and it actually opens a part of my mind that is otherwise more difficult to access. pop / rock / hip hop tends to distract me. einstein loved listening to music while he wondered about the mysteries of our universe. if it is good enough for einstein...
Instrumentals, electronic music, or classical music are fine.