I'm almost always listening to music while I am coding, and especially when I am at home, where I don’t need to wear my headphones. I listen to a lot of different music and usually try to listen to new music as well, something that it’s unfamiliar or that I haven’t heard before.
Some studies show that listening to music while working "can make us more productive". However, this study, suggests that listening to music may "disrupt creative performance in insight problem solving".
If I am working at home I can't stand being in a quiet room, so I need to listen to music. If I'm in an office I usually listen to something on my headphones, but not always. Sometimes I just listen to the noise of the room if it's not too disruptive.
The first instance of background music appeared, as far as I can tell, in France in 1917 when composer Eric Satie coined the term Furniture Music. Not a very flattering term, but I think you will find some of his music, such as the Gymnopédie No. 1, very well suited as background music while working. And this particular composition is almost always found in those several hours long playlists of classical music for concentration and mindful listening that are everywhere on Spotify, Youtube etc., together with Chopin's Nocturnes, Schubert sonatas and the list goes on.
Is Classical Music then best suited for this job? Perhaps. At least, some of it. I think if you listen to, for example Ionisation, a piece written in 1931 by Edgard Varèse, you will find that this might not work very as background music, at least in the same way that Satie’s music does. I'm not even going to mention composers from the Darmstadt School.
Is it music Pop music with vocals then? Or maybe Jazz? Perhaps Electronic dance music? I also find that music with repetitive structures works very well, which is at the core of a current of contemporary classical music known as Minimalism and in this Essay for BBC Radio 3 New York based novelist Hermione Hoby reveals how she always listens to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians while writing.
This might sound somewhat pretentious, but isn't writing code also some form of writing? We are all creators with stories to tell, are we not? What particular piece of music do you rely on to telling those stories?
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Latest comments (40)
Thanks for the article! I deeply love classical music and listen abundantly to it. When I code, I prefer not to be distracted by the pathos of some Romantic or late Romantic composers - so I would rather not listen to Brahms, Bruckner or Mahler. But I can really enjoy coding while listening to Beethoven, maybe it's the optimism and energy spreading from Beethoven's music that's contagious. Yes, for me coding takes a lot of mental energy and...optimism. You need to be resilient and in a way "heroic" to win over tests that keep failing and you don't know why! :)
So, for me, the best music I can listen to while coding is positive, vibrant, energetic music that doesnt have much pathos in it.
Baroque music, particularly Bach and his family can increase productivity, at least for me. Its rythm, repetition and "arithmetic" quality makes it very suitable for coding, for my tastes. But I cannot listen to Vivaldi, for instance, because there is a melancholy and a nostalgic beauty in this music, that makes me stop coding and just listen to it. After all, listening to music is an aesthetic activity - meaning by that, an activity that wakens your senses up. You just need to find the music that wakens the right senses for what you are doing. A certain type of classical music wakens too many senses up, so to say and it was intended to do so. If you need courage and a great motivation booster, well, probably Beethoven and Wagner are right for you. If you need patience and order, then it's Bach or Händel or even some symphonies or concertos by Haydn and Mozart. Contemporary music is too disruptive to listen while working, IMHO, and with a reason! There is normally a certain amount of protest or eversion to normal aesthetic tastes in contemporary music, that does not make it suitable for working, any work, at all.
Interesting, how about the music of Philip Glass - "music with repetitive structures"? I feel that minimalism works quite well while still being contemporary.
I made a playlist recently with some more music for this purpose which includes some contemporary stuff and a bit of jazz:
music.apple.com/no/playlist/figuri...
I recently discovered the music of Dobrinka Tabakova, very beautiful, a fantastic composer.
ah yes sure! In the end, while it can be generally true that music with repetitive structures can help productivity, choosing one or the other composer with this feature is still a very personal matter. I have listened to some Philip Glass' work, but it does not have that productivity effect on me, for instance...Jazz unfortunately neither :)))
I guess I still need a minimum of variation, otherwise I am distracted by obsessive repetition.
I will check Dobrinka Tabakova, thanks!!
I usually prefer progressive house or game/movie ost
For me it's ASMR.
I generally listen to a mixture of Power Metal, EDM/Dubtstep or just all round heavy metal.
It's a strange mixture to hold in a playlist but the constant shift in music types keeps me awake and going, especially on late nights.
The Portal 2 soundtrack. It's free.
I typically listen to a lot of rap and hip-hop, but as of recent, I've been listening to James Blake's Assume Form album!
Chiptunes/Old school video game music
I listen to Pink Floyd.
Progessive rock is more sound, less vocal.
I find post-rock music, which has long continuous tracks of lot of instrumentals and no vocals, helping me. I'd recommend listening to"God is an Astronaut" if someone is looking for something similar.
I usually listen to Soma FM, specialy the DefCon station.
Fast Electronic music. Usually some kind of dance music. The fast beat helps keep me focused.
I really love it to listen to film soundtracks! <3
There are some greate playlists on spotify! :)
It depends, most of the time I simply listen whatever was listening the day before.
My top 5 playlists for coding
Florian Prz ・ 1 min read
I listen piano cover song.
I totally gave up on listening music while coding because I observed that it was perturbing my concentration.
By the past, I was doing things that was very much repetitive and didn't involve the possibility of errors (like very easy HTML and CSS), then I used to listen to all sorts of Brian Eno music, by focusing on the Ambient series when needing to be more productive and I think it had some effect.
Today, for some reason, I don't need the music to achieve this effect, and it would even disturb me.