You probably want something slightly different. Fast-slow is one dimension, but pretty strong cognitive psychology research points at complexity (or even cognitive load more precisely, like new genres and off-tempo music). You can mix the two, but you can try fast, complex and new music for coding and see how it goes. It's easy in video games, since games have all the context and 'music too annoying for the fight' gets picked up quite easily in testing, even if someone happens to not know science behind it.

Check out graph on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law What you would ideally have is a music adapting to changes in your cognitive load - which can be modeled surprisingly easily with even the weakest biofeedback tools, like some smart bands. You know, how you sometimes have to turn off the radio when looking for something while driving, or how stuff is so easy it gets boring to the point where you can't work? Yeah, that's Yerkes-Dodson.

I bounced off that idea when trying to figure out reasonably popular band brand (because they are not trying to help you develop for that hardware) - if someone has any experience with those and likes the idea, absolutely hit me up.

From what I've read, shopping music was designed to provide a 15 minute cycle of stimulation and relaxation, as it was thought to increase sales. Rather than following your moods, it could be programmed to enhance your productivity.

But when my kids had those little Nintendo games, I was struck by the idea of having some kind of music that follows me through the ups and downs of life.

This was the thinking behind Muzak’s ‘Stimulus Progression’ background music concept [1], I wonder if this is what you’re referring to? Great tunes!

[1] https://youtu.be/AlY3jsxlzVg

Yes, that's it.

Interesting idea. I sometimes find that when I’ve been concentrating really hard, ‘in the zone’ (whether that’s programming or other cognitive work) I can come out it feeling quite stressed and drained.

So maybe experimenting with the opposite would be valuable for me: pick the tempo up when I’m slow, and then calm me down when I get too into it!

Not particularly music for programming but Opera GX Browser [0] inbuilt ambient music does this job. Obviously it is only for in-browser typing though.

[0] https://www.opera.com/gx

I'd say play sombre suspenseful scapes when nothing much's going on, since you're likely pondering how to proceed with your world domination plans.

Then funky techno action music when the execution phase commences.

Bhob Rainey's Peev attempts to do something like that: https://github.com/mphonic/peev

It's unfortunate there's no way to objectively infer one's mood because this would be the perfect use of that info

With an option to invert that pattern.

I’d be curious to see if more energetic music when I’m in a lull would speed things up. Musical motivation.

It might be more reflective of the intensity of your coding if you could have it go by depth in a syntactic construct; e.g. for Lisp, number of currently open parentheses. In fact, I now want to implement this — for Emacs, naturally.

Sounds like a good way for me to make a lot of errors because I’m trying to write things too fast.

I’ve found foreign language music and LoFi work fine, I just need to skip songs that aren’t working.