This brings back memories, Jeff… horrible, horrible memories.
In 1995, the only guy with a sound-card in our office would play Mr Tambourine Man or, worse, so much worse, Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds at least once a day, whenever he felt we were coding too productively.
The Swedish Chef from The Muppets, making Chocolate Moose, was played at least twice a day.
At least he only played Leonard Nimoy’s recordings on rare occasions.
congratulations, youve discovered that musical taste is largely a matter of exposure, which is exactly why criticising musical taste in the first place is idiotic since its so intrinsically subjective. if the rest of the world was willing to subject themselves to this sort of thing perhaps wed have less sanctimonious fucktards running around.
I listed to some of the mixwit of those songs. Ugggg 
A few of them were OK, but some were REALLY bad. I’m glad I didn’t work in your office – I would have had to change jobs.
About 10 years ago I had a project on such an unrealistic deadline (they set the deadline before anyone even could define the feature) that managment let me work from home so I could put in 14 hour days for 2 weeks straight.
One of the songs I listened to was Time Is… (ticking away) http://tinyurl.com/67yxbd by DC Talk. Guess I listened to it was on their Free At Last CD, but somehow, Time is ticking away just meant a lot to me.
Muskrat Love may be the worst song ever constructed.
I had my friend compose music to code by…
you can listen here : www.specialdirt.com/music.html
particularly Grateful at 3am
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m still amazed that we aren’t allowed to listen to music here. It’s written somewhere in the employee handbook that listening to music on the job is unprofessional. Or something to that effect. All I know is that I earned myself a good a$$-chewing when I left WinAmp open on my machine after lunch, and my boss happened to walk in and see it on my screen.
Whoa, those Windows NT guys are wild and crazy-- blasting that raucous heavy metal band Journey in the server room. Watch out for these guys at the office xmas party!
Listening to trance music makes me more productive. I’ve also come across other mentions of trance music as a productivity boost. I suspect it may be because the music does not require much attention and energizes you with its fast bpm.
I always listen to ambient music (Brian Eno, Boards of Canada, etc.) when I’m doing any programming. It’s perfect music because it’s just enough not to distract from the task at hand.
Starting about October, a past coworker of mine would start playing some wretched Christmas song by ‘The Waitresses’. It would go non stop until new years. It gets in your head no matter how much you hate it, and you find yourself humming it everywhere you go no matter how much you loathe yourself for it.
Another vote for SomaFM, tho’ I prefer the Space Station channel. The electronic soundscapes really help (me) set the mood for working at the computer.
BTW Jeff… since you are Shatner fan… get the 2004 ‘Has been’. His rendition of Common People is in fact awesome.
Regarding music to code by, although I am probably the same crusty age you and most of the readers, I will have to tell you that solid progressive trance is one of the best things to code to… and maybe a bit of Rammstein
My coworker uses Jingle Cats. His office shares a wall with our boss (CIO) and it just about drove the guy nuts. Meanwhile, my coworker is sitting there cranking it up all the time.
My coworkers and I used to have an End of Day mix that included Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back.
It became a unifying trend that really helped ease stress.
I love listening to music while I code. I’ve been listening to Phish - A Live One since I started playing with QBasic. It’s a great cd (2 cds) that just plays on in the background for hours. On the other end of the spectrum, I like Rage Against the Machine at high volume. Since I’m very familiar with their music, it doesn’t distract me at all. I suppose you could say I grok RATM. Good times…
A few years ago I sat across from one of the network guys and he would play John Mayer over and over. I hate that guy now. John Mayer that is and the network guy a bit too.
What could be better to code by than an album written entirely by a Software Engineer?
I hate to shamelessly self promote my own stuff, but instrumental music is proven to help concentration and I wrote and released an entire instrumental album by myself, playing all the instruments and mixing it all using Cubase.
Check it out, a lot of my friends code to it. I only tried it once and I couldn’t get over I wish I had done this, I should have tried this instead, etc.
http://www.amazon.com/Infinity/dp/B001CX3BX2/ref=dm_ap_alb1?ie=UTF8qid=1217586935sr=8-1
I accidentally posted this on another article first, sorry about that.
This may be an unpopular opinion - but everyone I know that is constantly listening to music while they code are slow and unproductive. Furthermore, on the flip side, the people that don’t are more focused on thier work and are more productive. I’ve noticed the productivity difference within myself as well. If I have music on, without headphones, at a very low volume - it makes good background noise and I can still concentrate. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but I believe that we are a culture obsessed with entertainment, and this tendency of people to always be listening to music is a major sign of that. People used to think clearly and concentrate a lot more than they do now. Think about how much you could have done/learned/experienced if you would take your headphones off once in a while and keep your TV off in the evenings.
I used to work in the military and deployed many times oversees, usually under the command of a slightly twisted captain who controlled the little operations room I worked in with constant harassment and intimidation. One night though, me and a few of my comrades were forced to work very late to finish up a project, and we were all extremely tired and stressed out. Our boss, though, shockingly, seemed to be in a rare good mood, and he asked us if we’d like to listen to some soothing music to cut down on the tension we were feeling. For a moment I thought, is it possible this man has a heart, after all? There was a cd player in the corner and he proceeded to put in Blues Traveler. I thought, well ok, I don’t really like Blues Traveler, but a little music is better than dead air.
However, what we didn’t know is that throughout the entire night, he would play the single Run-Around over and over again, continuously all night long! By the second hour that song became a chisel that constantly pounded into my head, making me wish I were temporarily deaf.
Now, of course, I hate that song.