Don't laugh, but for me, it's Abba. Their entire discography is ~3 hours which is how long I can maintain peak concentration. Their songs are consistently good so that I don't need to skip a song, but not too good that I would stop working and start listening. Plus I've never heard Abba song in any good movie so it doesn't remind me scenes from a movie I would want to rewatch. Of course I don't listen to it every day, only when I really need to, most daily programming tasks can be done with any music.

I’ve thought about and experimented with it a lot. The main criteria is no lyrics, or at a minimum lyrics in a language you don’t understand at all, since this hijacks attention from parts of the brain useful for programming in a noticeable way. I find prominent fast percussion seems to help with focus but I am less confident of that.

Most other elements don’t seem to matter too much. Baroque, industrial, ambient, etc are all effectively equivalent in most regards.

That said, I tend to lean toward 1990s atmospheric drum-and-bass (pretty much anything released by Good Looking Records) as a good default. That genre maximizes things that seem to help while minimizing things that seem to detract.

I love instrumental only hip hop beats like shamisen x hip hop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qi_-RmXz_g

This seems focused on one very particular taste in music of droning semi-random lo-fi synthesizers. I find this unlistenable without any kind of percussion.

Shoutout to SomaFM's Defcon Radio which has been my go-to programming music for years now. Not too dissimilar to the stuff found on this site. https://somafm.com/defcon/

This site is a gem that has accompanied me on many spikes in the last year :) datasette's original music is top tier too. cognitively stimulating but not attention stealing.

For me nothing beats 90s ambient dnb for coding. There's something about drum and bass that really gets me in flow.

I personally love my classic/progressive rock and am happy to listen to it while working. It seems odd to limit music for programming to only lo-fi.

<3 music for programming

some personal favourites:

- https://musicforprogramming.net/seventyone

- https://musicforprogramming.net/fiftyseven

- https://musicforprogramming.net/fortysix

I'm well aware that I'm in the minority, but I have never been able to focus on anything - especially programming - other than in absolute, total silence.

(Yes, I'm an only child.)

The soundtracks for SimCity 3000, 4, and the 5th one titled just "SimCity" are written specifically to be played while doing some fiddly micromanagement tasks.

I recently discovered Lorn and have been mainlining his back catalogue ever since whilst working. Thoroughly interesting and immersive yet not distracting.

I remember downloading music from the hacking e-show “The Scene” way back when - must have been late 2000s? Some great music in there like Newborn Butterflies if I remember the name right. It was nice background music in the show and I’d put it on from time to time.

I love progressive techno for this. No vocals and sounds are in the lower frequency range. Easy to tune out.

This is music for programming: https://velato.net/ (or music as programming??)

Swans is good for programming. And good for gnosis.

minecraft music is peak and takes all :)

This sight got me through many projects in college :)

Look up Dub Techno.

Iron Maiden for me :)