I usually turn on AnimeNFO radio with WMP. For some reason anime and videogame music help me to concentrate :)

The most recently I found the last album of Red hot cHili Peppers as a quite fine piece

Hey everyone :)

Thanks to everyone on here for messaging back! (and especially for being so kind and welcoming :))

Looks like a fair amount of varied music types (doesn't make me feel so weird haha). Seems like they had a pretty varied amount over at 100% Indie too - a lot of trance it seems? (http://www.100percentindie.com/2013/08/28/whats-your-fuel-the-indie-developers-soundtrack/)

What do you think? I like some, others I would rather avoid but hey each to their own eh :).

yeah, music+coding works pretty good IME.

less certain though, is recorded convention panels + coding, but this is still better than TV+coding, where TV tends to try to demand too much visual attention, which when coding is more needed to devote to coding. with convention panels, one can mostly leave it in the background until something interesting is said, or something comes up on screen which actually needs attention (vs just someone standing there talking about stuff).

multiple things involving natural-language will clash though, as my ability to fully mentally deal with natural language requires a lot of mental resources, though at a more basic level it is possible to listen to and keep track of several ongoing conversations at once (just not have focus on all of them at once), though noise-level and similar are fairly relevant for this.

luckily, natural language and coding are pretty much independent though, as code is mostly visual information, and most code-related thoughts tend to be fairly mechanistic, allowing for a little higher mental throughput.

like, I see some code and it seems to be processed "all at once", rather than sequentially (like natural language), and similar seems to also apply with things like looking at ASCII-text data files and often hex-dumps (though, this may involve more mental work if decoding the files' data from its hex dump).

however, I am usually unable to actually remember most of this...

like, my ability to actually remember information is on-par with my ability to type it out, which is at least a little faster than my ability to process or compose natural-language text (actually pretty slow). then again, some people have claimed that me typing stuff sounds like rapidly hammering the keyboard as well. but, OTOH, it still manages to take a long time to read, think-about, and respond to things.

back to the power of music in all this:

I think it helps in the sense that it can help focus things and provide a sense of energy and motivation.

though, this likely depends a lot of the type of person and musical style though.

or such...

I listen to mood-setting ambient recordings, like long loops of recordings in rain forests or waves on beaches or wind in trees.

Check out rainymood.com for a really accessible example. It's a 20 minute long looping recording of a thunderstorm with some slight soft instrumentals added to accent the existing sound. No lyrics, or talking at all, no rythm. Nothing to concentrate on. To me, this music playing in the background ends up *sounding* even quieter than a totally quiet room.

My hearing doesn't ramp up and start fixating on every weird little noise I hear, like my neighbors yelling at each other, or what totally might be a mouse in the wall. It just ends up swamped with something that is too unstructured to really achieve that heightened state of listening, and thus I can focus on a task.

Depends on the focus state i'm @ that moment, but usually dead silence and when coding and some random sh*t while doing "art"work.

This is all you need:

This is all you need:

That is very beautiful.

I like this:

In fact I find most of Bluetech's music to be meditative when coding to it.

This one was the first one I heard when forced to learn the Java language at University :)

yet recently I encounter a band called Perfect Circle,

previously unknown, a heard about but thought it is some weak stuff, but, no, they seem to be quite good

My computer can't handle Eclipse + YouTube/iTunes at the same time, so when I do listen to music it is pretty jittery.

I have been listening to YMO Solid State Survivor over and over. It gets me into a kind of "epic" coding mode where I start typing really fast.