Music for Programming

Through years of trial and error — skipping around radio streams, playing entire collections on shuffle, or repeating certain tracks over and over — we have found that the most compelling music for sustained concentration tends to contain a mixture of the following:

Noise

Drones

Arpeggios

Atmospheres

Field Recordings

Arrhythmic Textures

Vagueness (Hypnagogia)

Microtones / Dissonance

Detail / Finery / Patterns

Awesome / Daunting / Foreboding

Vast / Transcendental / Meditative

Music possessing the above qualities can provide just the right amount of cognitive load to engage the parts of your mind that would otherwise be left free to wander and lead to distraction.

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