Ask HN: Hacking Music

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851303

by vmmenon • 16 years ago

7 27 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What music do you'll listen to while in the zone ?

kingsidharth• 16 years ago

Zeplin!

ciaranbradley• 16 years ago

I thoroughly recommend "Drumming" by Steve Reich.

phamilton• 16 years ago

My last big code session was with ACDC playing. That was a "I've got 2 hours to implement these features" session.

martinp• 16 years ago

Thunderstruck on repeat. Always. From now and until the end of time.

antareus• 16 years ago

Chillout is my go to. Check out groups like Blue Sky Black Death (instrumental hip-hop), Portishead, and Apparat. The genre is big -- you can spend a lot of time finding stuff you like.

wlk• 16 years ago

I recently listened a lot of "Grateful Dead" , it really kept me going.

ZeroMinx• 16 years ago

Atari Teenage Riot.

wicknicks• 16 years ago

Anything from the Beatles to melodic death metal keeps me ticking :)

aw3c2• 16 years ago

This has been here countless times https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:news.ycombinator.com+music+wh... and it rarely was more than name-dropping.

marssaxman• 16 years ago

psychedelic and/or progressive trance. nothing like 135-140 bpm and a lot of trippy filter twirling to keep my brain happy while I work.

redfloatplane2• 16 years ago

Right now, The Social Network soundtrack. Before I bought that, M83 or 65daysofstatic. Postrock, mostly, with no goddamn lyrics.

swah• 16 years ago

Do you mean the 5 free ones?

redfloatplane2• 16 years ago

Nope. I actually bought the soundtrack. Only $5 for a lossless download. €3.59, you can't exactly go wrong. http://www.nullco.com/TSN/

trafficlight• 16 years ago

There is too much going on in 65daysofstatic songs. I end up focusing on the elements of the music and not on the task at hand.

glaze• 16 years ago

Juno Reactor.

ifthen• 16 years ago

Don’t know if others experience this, but I can’t listen to anything with lyrics while figuring things out because it distracts me, so movie scores work best. (Currently, that’s James Horner, Thomas Newman etc.) When I’m banging work out in the production phase though where I don’t need to think, then metalcore/metal/hard rock.

gatsby• 16 years ago

Jazz.

mehulkar• 16 years ago

I like this idea. Any suggestions particularly?

charlesdm• 16 years ago

Vocal trance

ggordan• 16 years ago

I tend to listen to FrenchKissFM. It's an online radio station. Mostly electronic, and house music. Very few lyrics which is great since it doesn't distract me too much.

http://www.frenchkissfm.com/?page_id=3783

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Oh no, not again ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61831

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132026

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=167076

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=367418

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668087

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716219

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=769769

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209378

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525445

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734122

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833040

-----

And again, from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716262 - one of the many times this question has come up ...

None - I can't code while music is on. Ditto conversation, and ditto doing math.

There was something in PeopleWare (I think) about an experiment done with people listening to music. Those listening to their preferred music performed about as well as those who preferred silence and got it, and about as well as those who preferred music, but had silence. The group that preferred silence but had music performed, unsurprisingly, comparatively badly.

The sting in the tail was this. The task they were given had an "Aha!" insight buried in it. Namely, the full set of transforms they'd been asked to implement turned out to be trivial, although the individual components weren't.

All the programmers who had the "Aha!" moment had silence, regardless of their preference. No one with music saw the short cut.

I've since tried to find concrete evidence to support this anecdote, either papers, or first hand accounts, but the recounting in PeopleWare remains the only reference I have.

Natsu• 16 years ago

> None - I can't code while music is on. Ditto conversation, and ditto doing math.

I'm the same way. I have to turn it off or it distracts me and breaks my focus.

mahmud• 16 years ago

Not only am I incapable of productive work with music or sound, I temporarily lose speech if I am interrupted. If the phone rings while I am coding I don't even bother to answer: I will not be able to talk anyway, and I wont remember anything you tell me.

fictorial• 16 years ago

http://aux.zendesk.com/wall/

pstinnett• 16 years ago

http://ghostly.com/discovery

frobozz• 16 years ago

Brown noise with oscillating volume, mostly. http://www.simplynoise.com/

hnal943• 16 years ago

They Might Be Giants

Ask HN: Hacking Music

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