What's your preferred music for working? (whatever you class as 'doing work', be that hacking or designing or just normal office/bureaucratic stuff)<p>This poll is entirely to judge opinions, not to find the 'best' music for working.<p>(Feel free to vote for more than one if you work with more then one kind of music.)
I subscribe to the view that music hinders concentration more than it favours it. Your brain is forced to multitask, which is inherently more difficult than concentrating on one line of thought.
However, I have seen it working in a pavlovian way, signaling to the brain that "it's time to work". This can be useful when conditioning people who struggle to concentrate for long periods.
Personally, it's whatever I can listen to that I can't sing along to. That can either be something purely instrumental (most of Pendulum's songs, e.g.), something in a different language (Sigur Ros), or mashups (Girl Talk).
I <i>LOVE</i> to work with some light/easy on the ears electronical music in the background (mostly remixes and some dubstep tracks).<p>I recently discovered tammyszu's Youtube Channel[1] and usually kick some of her playlists on when I arrive at work. She has over 500 videos, so every time it's something new... And almost every video is just amazing and refreshingly different and works super-well for me for programming.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/tammyszu" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/tammyszu</a>
Electronic - huge fan of <a href="http://www.di.fm" rel="nofollow">http://www.di.fm</a> as it lets me skip around different styles depending on what I'm working on (deep concentration: trance/minimal techno. 2am hackfests where I need to stay awake: drum and bass. 4am hackfests where I'm going slightly insane: happy hardcore).
Recently I've been tuning in to rainymood.com for some background noise to drown out the chaos where I work.<p>It's about a 45 minute track of a thunderstorm.<p>Edit: fixed link, thanks for the correction.
For working (finance) - no music. For coding (casual) - Trance. Something like AvB. It helps me get into that flow state & when I'm there I block it out completely anyway.
No electronic music, what?<p>I'd think programmers would listen to electronic music more than the average person... Kraftwerk, anyone? (in my ears right now)