Ask Slashdot: What Music do you Code By?

Silas writes "I value music as an important part of the coding/debugging/designing process, and choosing what music to listen to while working on a given piece of code can be as subtle and interesting a process as choosing what data structure or regular expression to use. My personal selection varies from Mozart to Happy Rave, Dave Matthews Band to Enigma, but I'm interested to know what members of the larger coding community listen to when they're doing their thing, getting in the zone. What music do you code by?" Ah. I like nothing less than coding to a good progressive Drum 'N Bass song. What about you all?

Britney!

Its hard to have an insightful comment about this topic, as music taste usually comes down to, well taste, and everybody has one. I also think its a bit of situation and mood thing.

Call me a moron, but for those 5 in the morning sessions, when one has had so much sugar, caffiene, etc that the body is about the crystalize and the brain is working on sheer impulse rather than thought: nothing beats some really shallow happy girl pop like Britney Spears or Spice Girls.

I wouldn't be caught dead listening to that in the day (unless its on MTV of course), but when my brain is soft and mushy, pop seems closer to its resonant frequency. No one gives motivation as the sun climbs over the horizon after a sleepless night like my lovely Britney..

Otherwise I like music with a more character and maturity, even when I'm concentrating. Preferably some of the 70s Pink Floyd or David Bowie albums, whose effect is the opposite: allowing me to calm down and concentrate on solving a problem.

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/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

Music?

I just cat my source to the sound card!

cat somelameproject/*.c > /dev/audio

***bzzt*crackle***

It doesnt last very long tho'

Silence

Painful though it can be...
I play too many instruments- any music worth a damn tends to make me sing/drum/play along with it or at least _think_ it so powerfully that there's no way I can code.
Oddly enough, I have found a sound I can code to, it's just a disturbing sound. Occasionally I will listen to the satellites just beyond the 30-meter shortwave band. It's a roaring electronic noise with rumble and an alien electronic twitter overlaid on it, and will happily continue for hours without a break like an 'environments' record. The fact that it is really abrasive bothers me not at all :) actually, thinking about it makes me want to put on that 'station'! Also, listening to shortwave stations in languages I don't understand is another coding-positive sound environment. Usually it's just silence though, which is why I have a tough time working when it's not very late at night. I need _real_ silence, not random peoplenoise from outside :P

The real question..

..is not what you lissen to, but how you lissen to it. If you have a large collection of MP3s then there is a good chance that you spend a LARGE amount of time skipping songs.

Example: Song you are not in the mood for comes on, so you stop work for a second and press skip and go back to work, but just before your brain switches back to code mode another song you don't want to here right now comes on and you must stop work again.

The tradiotnal solution to this is playlists, but it is easy to have too many MP3s to use them effectivly.. or just not understand your own lissening habits.

The solution I came up with is to use a primitive AI (well not really, but almost) to try and learn my lissening habits for me. It also shows you the next 20 songs it is going to play and allows you to cancel them from the list BEFORE they start playing.. this makes an incredible diffrence in the ammount of time you waist skipping songs in random play mode. You can check out the Perl source to smartplay [gtf.org], but be forewarned it is proof of concept.. and not really all that stable or polished. Plus, it takes a while to really learn anyhitng about you, but maybe someday someone who really knows something about AI will pick up the idea.


Related to efficency: There is music out there, like Brian Eno, which is specifically designed (well.. sorta) to make you more productive (well.. sorta). The idea being that the music removes destractions (well.. sorta). I personally lissen to Techno since it seems to fit in well with the mind set required for programming. If your a Techno hater you should try lissening to it while your programming.. I've seen people made into Techno fans this way.

Jeff

A metacomment, if you will.

This topic has quickly garnered far more than the average number of responses (over 400 when I first saw it), but the response tree is very flat -- it looks like 97% of the responses are top-level responses.

It seems that everyone wants to get their two obols in, but hardly anyone cares what anyone else is saying. [Not to imply that I'm any different!]

Actually, it looks like a poll where all the votes have to be write-in votes. A nice idea, in fact, though we need a pattern matcher to go through and generate summary results. [Are you reading, Rob?]

It would be nice to start doing polls like this: generate a free-for-all like the current one, run stats on it after a few days, and then post the summary in the (former) "poll" box, for further discussion of the actual results.

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It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?