Top 5 Coding Albums Of All Time | Hacker News Reader

Top 5 Coding Albums Of All Time

drbunsen.org

35 pointssebrowns31 comments

It's already come up in the comments there, but Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is my favorite. In a similar vein, any of the other early ambient house stuff that came out around that time is good: Black Dog Productions - Bytes springs to mind, as well as The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld or whatever the hell its called. Make sure to get the 2CD deluxe edition.

Then there's the various Artificial Intelligence LPs that came out early in Warp Records' history, and not forgetting basically the entire output of Plaid.

This stuff is all kinda texture-based and blends into the background, its non-distracting and doesn't demand your attention. This is fine most of the time, I find its nicer than working in silence, which can sometimes be intimidating/boring. Obviously sometimes actual silence is called for, when working out something particularly tricky.

What I find surprising however is that sometimes I feel the need to listen to music that I would otherwise find extremely distracting, with constantly shifting rhythm and melody that demands attention and analysis. In certain situations I find it spurs motivation. Sometimes I can just put on Detrimentalist by Venetian Snares and just go crazy and knock out two days worth of code in four hours. Intense music often accompanies intense work for me, music that would ordinarily be so intense as to prevent work. The direction of causation here isn't obvious at all.

+1 for Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Great album. Similar recommendations:

Steve Roach - Structures from Silence

Sky - Dreams

Global Communication - 12:18

any Slumberland compilation

bluemars.org streams.

I find lyrics in music very distracting when trying to concentrate, so my go-to focus music when I need to Get Things Done is jazz. John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis.

That said, the first album in my "Concentration" playlist is actually "Music for Airports" by Brian Eno [1]. It's ambient music from the late 70s that was actually intended to be played in an airport. It's light, airy, and awesome. It's a four track album where each track is long: 17 minutes for the first track.

If you've never heard it, give it a listen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports

Music for airports was recommended in one of the Oreilly Mind Hacks books (which i don't hvae in front of me)

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007799/

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101534/

Well Pink Floyd is not on Grooveshark, and some of the albums are incomplete but I put something together.

http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Dr+Bunsen+s+Coding+Playlist/...

I like the style of music outlined in TFA, but my top 5 coding albums have a bit more of an edge to 'em.

Reign in Blood, Slayer

Rust in Peace, Megadeth

Vulgar Display of Power, Pantera

Battle of Los Angeles, Rage

Kill 'Em All - Metallica

The Field - Yesterday & Today The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

easily the two best coding albums of all time

To drag it strongly into "coding" for real, Craig Armstrong (does lots of movie soundtracks) wrote a pretty cool song where the "lyrics" are a woman reading out a raw HTML document: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZA5K15iLMM

Sigur Ros - Takk. I bet I've played this 1000+ times while working over the years.

http://beta.rhapsody.com/#/artist/sigur_ros/album/Alb.760665...

That is pretty scary. I use everything but Pink Floyd.

K&D, I remember was used when you first started the articulating iMac during initial setup, AND used in an excellent documentary Startup.com

Excellent list!

For some reason I just really don't like Mezzanine. I know it's a huge album, and I like ambient/minimal electronic music... but there's something just a little off-putting about it to me.

That being said, I have a mix of Loscil (great music, and named after a command in Csound, even), Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, and Pat Metheny.

I can't listen to jazz while coding. Jazz is foreground music. It's communicative: it grabs your attention and forces you to listen. It would be like trying to read a book and watch a movie at the same time.

For me it's ambient and/or electronic (particularly Brian Eno) or occasionally a bit of folk or indie.

Ever listen to Bonobo? It's jazzy ambient/electronic stuff. Check out the album 'Black Sands', especially the song 'Kong'

For some reason I seem to get heaps done whilst listening to Metal band 'Insomnium'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K003TNG40P8 doesn't interfere with my thinking as much as other Metal bands, can blend into the background nicely

Really?

What's next? The Five Best Coding Drinks? Air Fresheners? Light Bulbs?

Anyway, music is such a subjective choice.

Plus, listening to music (or anything really) while performing any kind of cognitive task has generally been shown to be a distraction [1] [2] [3] (and others).

[2] has an interesting quote:

> IT105 students did not perform as well with music on the graded labs 2 out of 3 times while IT155 students performed better while listening to music. The inverted-U hypothesis also known as the Yerkes-Dodson law [10] can be applied to the results. The inverted-U hypothesis predicts performance improves on a task with increased emotional arousal up to a point after which performance on the task deteriorates. The optimal level of arousal for a task depends on the complexity of the task. When the task is complex a low level of arousal is optimal. When the task is simple a higher level of arousal will lead to peak performance.

[1]: http://iris.lib.neu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&...

[2]: http://www.asee.org/documents/sections/middle-atlantic/sprin...

[3]: http://www.quora.com/Does-listening-to-music-while-programmi...

This submission is light on content, heavy on subjective music taste (and Amazon affiliate links). It's only tangentially related to programming (if at all) and has nothing to do with startups.

I know someone is going to quote the guidelines which say "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" but let's be honest: this submission is pretty weak.

The submission may be little more than amazon-whoring, but this little discussion about distraction we're having here is pretty good.

Another interesting part of the second study was the finding that music was less distracting for those students involved in honors courses, and for the most competent it appeared to help them. This fits with the fact that the task was about learning java, and as such is not the best model of the average HN user's day. While we all maintain that "every day is a learning experience" and we're constantly taking on new skills, an 8 hour workday spent writing rails code is manifestly not the same as taking your first steps into Java at university.

OP's only submissions are to articles on this domain, too. Undisclosed affiliate links are tacky, but he'll probably make a few hundred $$$ off of getting this story on the frontpage since anything you buy on Amazon in the next 24 hours he will get credited for.

How much karma do you need to be able to downvote stories?

I actually found this article useful. I wouldn't actually listen to any of the albums but I find I do make a concious effort to pick what I listen to carefully before setting out for a day of coding.

I actually find I do my best and fastest work listening to drum and bass.

You could find a lot of things distracting when coding, personally I find the sound of tractors and drill saws out the window distracting so I escape to music.

I would add to you list: best shoes to wear while coding, best carpet, best candles and, of course, best room paint color. This is what real men care about while coding, not algorithms, design patterns and all those girly topics.

The distraction bit is generally subjective, as well. Without music, I'm distracted by other things that actually pull me away from the computer. With music, I'm glued.

I found the list to be helpful, actually.

Yes, some of these "best of" lists come of as a little too scientific, but I always add ", IMO" to end of the heading and don't think much about it.

+1 for "Something Else", great album

As for me, I can't get any work done without this: http://soundcloud.com/birdfeeder/jurassic-park-theme-1000-sl...

Note: use only when silence is not possible.

Infected Mushroom - Classical Mushroom is my go-to "gotta get stuff done" coding album. I highly recommend it.

I have used the soundtrack from Half-Life 2, and it kinda worked...

Personal Favorite: "Black Sands", by Bonobo

for me anything non-repetitive, non-lyrical and not incredibly overrated like Ghosts I-IV works for coding music

funny, 3 of the 5 mentioned albums belong to my favorites :)

Second toughest in the infants - Underworld

The belly of an architect OST - Wim Mertens

rainymood.com

Yo drbrunsun, I'm happy for you and imma let you finish but fight club had one of the top 5 coding Albums of all time!

Seriously, fight club soundtrack, music by dust brothers, it's a great coding album.

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