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Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

It depends on my mood. I find productive music to almost always lack vocals. I will list some artists and their respective albums, of the top of my head. (subgenres) Many of these artists have great discographies.

Electronic

1. Glenn Underground - Atmosfear (house)

2. Aphex Twin - Ambient Works 85-92

3. Moby - 18

4. Space Dimension Controller - The Pathway To Tiraquon6 (soul-house)

5. Boards of Canada - Music has the right to Children

6. Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing By

Post-Classical

1. Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

2. Ólafur Arnalds - ...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness

3. Max Richter - Memoryhouse

4. Nico Muhly - Speaks Volumes

Pop/Indie/Jazz

1. Royksopp - Melody AM

2. The Album Leaf - In a Safe Place

3. Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun

4. Miles Davis - In a Silent Way

5. Benoit Pioulard - Lasted

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"I find productive music to almost always lack vocals."

Languages you don't speak also work.

LoL!! Try coding to Gangnam!!

I'll echo this sentiment. Been listening to a lot of music from Mali and being really productive with it on. Highly recommend Khaira Arby, Ali Farka Touré and Amadou & Mariam.

Thanks for this list, I went through everything you listed and found a few new albums which fit my coding music tastes.

Along the the same lines as fumar's suggestions, I recommend:

1. Music from Braid (yes, the video game)

2. Black Swan (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

3. The Social Network Soundtrack

Inception OST is insane too. Live long, Hans Zimmer!

I think you would like everything from Bonobo. Warning: addictive - I often keep his new albums on repeat for many weeks.

I created a Spotify playlist with all of these albums (except Boards of Canada and Nico Muhly, not available):

http://open.spotify.com/user/ryan.aidan/playlist/5ot3B9EqCZF...

Thanks! I will use it myself. Spotify is lacking some great music, that includes BoC. But, in general, I find myself using it more than I thought.

Shameless plug. I released an EP recently. I will be honest only two tracks are, what I consider, finished work. Track 2 and 5. But, still learning... fantasmafigueroa.bandcamp.com

Check out Tycho, which is available on Spotify. Similar to BoC and also excellent.

Would like to add the Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alvo Noto collaborations as well as the pole Red, Blue, Yellow albums to this!

We enforce this in the rules on our communal listening site, http://codingsoundtrack.org -- we like to think it's something to do with that part of our brains already being dedicated to understanding computer language.

I usually put 2 or 3 quiet electronic/trip-hop songs in my playlist and then I use the last.fm similar tracks to fill up the playlist, works quite well:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/177896/WP_Shot.PNG

try these https://soundcloud.com/shawndumas/likes

> I find productive music to almost always lack vocals.

This agrees with generally accepted psychological models. The mind is totally single-threaded in language processing/parsing (compared to incredible parallelism in spatial processing).

This is why I don't understand you can hear voices in the coffitivity vocals, you need music not to catch some (parts of) sentences here and there. I do like it so far though, on the note of music that is nice to code to try out Pretty Lights.

Got some of those in your list myself. More to include: 1) Eno - Music for Airports <br> 2) Kaen - Interworlds 3) Shulman - Random Thoughts. It's too engrossing the first few times. After that, pretty good for background music.

Thanks. I will try it out.

Instrumental/lack of vocals also helps me. I mostly listen to post rock - godspeed you!black emperor, pelican, mogwai.

Carbon Based Lifeforms

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