Ask HN: What do you listen to while you code? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you listen to while you code?

14 pointsboffinism30 comments

<self-promotion>I finished up making https://whyarentyoucoding.com/audio.html</self-promotion> and it made me curious about other people's habits.

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Listening to the same "meditative" album over and over again (such as Kraftwerk's Autobahn) can induce a Pavlovian effect of entering flow states easily ;)

I do the same thing and it was life changing for me when I discovered this. I just have to remain mindful of making sure to stop the music when I choose to take a break/procrastinate.

https://musicforprogramming.net/

Depends on what I'm doing.

1. "Mundane work" - Anything, with or without lyrics. I'm a huge fan of funk, Motown, classic rock, city pop, and more.

2. "Some concentration" - Opera or instrumental music. The oud is one of my favorite instruments and I have a playlist devoted to Middle Eastern music that has lots of oud-focused songs.

3. "More concentration" - Ambient music and atmospheric sounds. For instance, there's an hour-long YT video of the ambient noises from Thief: The Dark Project that I can put on, as well as a few others from other games.

4. "Full concentration" - Silence.

It varies a lot. For many years I mostly listened to heavy metal or hip-hop while coding. I've also always listened to classical music instead, at times. But more and more over the last couple of years I've drifted to listening to synthwave / darkwave / retrowave type stuff when coding. It's still a mix of "all of the above" but the ratio has gradually skewed more and more in favor of the synthwave stuff.

Every once in a while I'll opt for something completely different like one of those "coffee shop sounds" tracks or something.

Silence. As much silence as possible. I want to drown in it.

This is one:

Music video: Sitar - Vilayat khan - Rarely Heard Ragas: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/10/music-video-sitar-vilaya...

The "lofi hiphop radio - beats to relax and study to" channel on youtube[0].

Normally I have the attention span of a magpie (which is why I have HN open all the time) but it really helps me focus.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qap5aO4i9A

I enjoy Infected Mushroom and other EDM songs. I find the repetitive nature of the songs to help with focus.

I listen to the playlists for the podcast "Flow State".

https://anchor.fm/flow-state

I use "alexa play coffee beats". Puts me in a bit of a trance.

Lofi tends to feel too melancholic

Static white noise / nature sounds is too monotonous

Regular pop music has lyrics and jams my thinking ability

Classical is pretty decent too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3pgStuj54&t=336s

posh isolation (and associated artists) are releasing some really nice ambient

Emancipator (manages to put me in the state of focus more than any other artist), Shpongle, video game music.

I guess the important part is that the music shouldn't have too much focus on drums.

On rare occasions ambient stuff like a cafe or rainy forest sounds

Nothing. Seems a strange question, like What do you read while you sleep.

This Q was last asked 13 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117993

It is relevant for me. I am WFH but there can be noisy children outside my window. Unfortunately I can't really get away from it but I so own a pair of noise cancelling earphones. Those with some music makes the problem go away. So I am always interested in what people listen to while they work.

I used to listen to ambient music, eg: Brian Eno mashup on Spotify. Now I mostly to listen to podcast while coding.

Queen / Kaiser Chief / Pink Floyd / REM / other “soft rock”

Although Clubhouse rambling is good too

Silence, otherwise somr lofi hip hop beats go study / relax to.

For thought-heavy work: Data center sounds from mynoise.net

For rote work: hard techno, schranz or happy hardcore

I try to listen to my thoughts, any outside interference is not good.

These days, those "lofi" tracks that seem popular.

Myself questioning the decisions I've made in life.

power supply fan, case fan, cpu fan, gpu fan, etc.

@IAmDevloper has a great album of lofi.

Music, podcasts

anything that keeps the tinnitus away

Keyboard clicks

I would actually enjoy hearing keyboard clicks come through my headphones while I listen to music. I wonder if there's something that can make that possible.

yea, write it, in Swift because for MacOS (I have MacOS). Should be simple thing.

Each key hits a different part of the keyboard's plastic under-plate, resulting in a slightly different sound. I wonder where you could source the sounds..

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