I often have ASMR videos or fan noise going. Anything without words (or in a language I don’t know) otherwise the language processing part of my brain gets tied up and it slows me down.
Awesome! Thanks, gang. Keep 'em coming if you want. These are great selections. I found some Spotify Brain Food playlists on YouTube and I’m checking that out now, it’s definitely the type of thing I’m looking for. I kept looking for study/coding music on YouTube and found the selections to be TOO light for me.
Frogs singing, high surf, waves breaking on the banks of a lake, brook, rapids, “kachuck-kachuck” noise of train wheels going through a switch, pink noise, a chorus of chanted “ahhhh” looping continuously, There are also some stuff easily cooked up on analogue synthesizers, particularly a sort of wobbly bass note.
The first suggestion is “classical crossover”–popular songs done as instrumental/classical–if that appeals I would recommend the Vitamin String Quartet, which does string quartet versions of a lot of different pop songs. They’re really well done; not schmaltzy or kitschy (much), just kind of plainspoken straightforward renditions of the songs. There’s a ton of their stuff on whatever streaming service you prefer.
The main issue may be if you wind up spending a lot of time guessing what song they’re playing. There was a radio station in New Hampshire that due to a dispute about the broadcast license wound up playing nothing but VSQ for several years, and my partner and I would always have a good time trying to guess what we were listening to whenever we drove within range. A side effect was that I found out The Red Hot Chili Peppers sound pretty amazing played by a string quartet, specifically songs from Californication for some reason.
[EDIT: The actual answer is that I listen to the sort of noisy jazz that I listen to all the rest of the time, but that’s probably not too helpful to anyone who doesn’t already like that stuff.]
If I do listen to music, most of the time it has to be nonvocal or without vocals I can understand and not sleep-inducing, so sometimes interesting high-energy “New Age” or “World Music” fills the bill. Sometimes I will just look for “creative binaural music” on Youtube.
I did write one entire screenplay with Maroon5’s “This Love” on repeat, but that was totally the mood.
Frequent go-tos: Enigma “Le Roi Est Mort”, Trance Mission “Meanwhile…”, Portishead, Massive Attack “Mezzanine”, Mike Oldfield “Tubular Bells” (the whole album, not just the Exorcist part), Tangerine Dream, Yanni “Keys to Imagination”. Dead Can Dance. Orb “Peel Sessions”.
For coding - especially the more creative bits - I like to listen to film soundtracks, usually non vocal tracks. Current favourites include “A Theory of Everything” and the recent “Wonder Woman”. Or Two Steps From Hell trailer music, though that can be a bit exciting at times!
If I’m doing something tedious, like reorganising lots of Inform tables or similar, I may listen to vocal tracks, including some of my top rated pop songs. But usually non vocal are best for me.
Hanon, I’ve always felt we operate on the same wavelength to some extent, and this music list pretty much clinches it. I’ve lost months of my life to Tubular Bells, and I know that no one casually namedrops Yanni on a list like this because they want to impress their friends with how cool they are.
Some of the earlier Yanni recordings are very synth-heavy, but he got popular and did some full concerts and his music played by an orchestra is actually really good.