Its called conditioning the mind.

Its a bit like the right pane in eclipse, In years I never remember using it even once, yet its absence will irritate me.

Ever get that feeling sometimes when you are surrounded by people in a noisy place and yet after sometime sort of don't even feel that is disturbance.

My SO though, is exactly the opposite. She just can't get any work done in silence, and needs relatively fast music with vocals. Although it does need to be music that she's already familiar with, otherwise she gets distracted by having to listen to the lyrics.

Now I don't own a TV and rarely listen to radio, and my tastes have dramasticly broadened, so I almost never listen to the same song more than a handful of times. I find lyrics are a show stopper. Even overly ambitious classical, jazz, electronica trips me up.

Here's a playlist I've been listening to for a while, seeded by, of all things, gopro surf videos, which has become my go-to study set, usually fed in with Bose QC-15s

http://open.spotify.com/user/grep2grok/playlist/1NcLBwixEKqQ...

[1] I think this is called 'brown noise' these days.

  sox -r 48000 -n -d synth pink

I also tend to listen to:

  sox -n -d synth sine %-5 sine %-14 vol 0.5

    play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth 01:00 brownnoise \
    reverb 19 vol 0dB bass 6 treble -3 repeat 558

It sounds like a big waterfall, or like a continuous wave crash. And it's stereo. :)

EDIT: Or this:

    play --show-progress -c 2 --null synth brownnoise \
    reverb bass 6 treble -3 echos 0.8 0.9 1000 0.3 1800 0.25

You could check them out here http://simplynoise.com/

EDIT: I just clicked the link 'simply rain' on that site- that is more like what I listen to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtimhT-ff4

I have a music composition and conducting background, so any kind of music ends up distracting me at some level.

Yikes. What terrible branding!

"Green noise" is better, sort of honest, and obvious.

Cheap humor though, I apologize.

I'm sorry, documentation requires less concentration?

I find (I hypothesize) that because I'm doing something which balances the hemispheres more (and requires me to get inside the head of my user) music doesn't work for documentation, it's too distracting. Programming yes, ambient works well, but writing...

Now, I will plan the documentation away from music, and I'll edit it away from a computer, but music gives you a "permission to suck" and just get words on the paper. Once you have words on the paper, you have something that can be molded.

Do you have a source for this?

"During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music. They polled a group of computer science students and divided the students into two groups, those who liked to have music in the background while they worked (studied) and those who did not. Then they put half of each group together in a silent room, and the other half of each group in a different room equipped with earphones and a musical selection.Participants in both rooms were given a Fortran programming problem to work out from specification. To no one's surprise, participants in the two rooms performed about the same in speed and accuracy of programming. As any kid who does his arithmetic homework with the music on knows, the part of the brain required for arithmetic and related logic is unbothered by music —there's another brain center that listens to the music. The Cornell experiment, however, contained a hidden wild card. The specification required that an output data stream be formed through a series of manipulations on numbers in the input data stream. For example, participants had to shift each number two digits to the left and then divide by one hundred and so on, perhaps completing a dozen operations in total. Although the specification never said it, the net effect of all the operations was that each output number was necessarily equal to its input number. Some people realized this and others did not. Of those who figured it out, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room."

(I hope this still counts as fair-use)

The whole part "Creative Space" is longer than my excerpt, so if you have access to Peopleware I recommend reading all of it.

http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_12

You could reason that if you engage the brain with something, then it cannot do another thing at the same time. So if you engage the areas responsible for creative thought processes, these areas will not be available for other tasks.

Obviously this might not be the same for everyone, I'm just cautioning people and urging everyone to do some testing.

Another example is that many people (including myself) can't dictate, for the same reasons. In my case, whenever I use dictation, I later go back and re-read what I wrote and it is always disappointing. It seems the areas of my brain that process speech are also needed to form thoughts into sentences and I just can't do both well.

Nothing beats the overriding hum of a server room though - Pure white noise at loud enough volumes that you can't talk easily with other people. Stick some ear plugs in to dampen the volume a little, and you're set to go.

I talked about some other Coders about that. About 20 People. The strange thing was that 7 need music that pump them up like rock or something like that. 7 need relaxing/chillout music( iam in that group) and 6 of them need silence.

So i think there is no general way of what you can listen or not to.

Most pop or classical music demands your attention; you'll pay good money to go to a concert where you sit in a chair and pay attention for a prolonged period. Dance/trance/techno provides high energy as a driver of activity, not a focus; you'll go to an event (dance) to focus on the activity, with the music as background motivation. Hence I listen to trance podcasts, getting the push and occupying a busy-but-unrelated-to-programming part of my brain, while also drowning out background noise (factory, sales guy on phone at next desk, ...).

Studies might suggest so, but irl programmings have been creating very cool stuff with music blazing from the speakers.

From Notch to JZW.

I love listening to music while pixel juggling UI's or fixing bugs but as soon as I start working on a scheduling algorithm or something similar I have to turn the music off.

Kind of like how (for me, at least!) it's nearly impossible to effectively read and have a conversation at the same time as they are using the same language part?