Music for Programming

Through years of trial and error — skipping around radio streams, playing entire collections on shuffle, or repeating certain tracks over and over — we have found that the most compelling music for sustained concentration tends to contain a mixture of the following: Noise Drones Arpeggios Atmospheres Field Recordings Arrhythmic Textures Vagueness (Hypnagogia) Microtones / Dissonance Detail / Finery / Patterns Awesome / Daunting / Foreboding Vast / Transcendental / Meditative Music possessing the above qualities can provide just the right amount of cognitive load to engage the parts of your mind that would otherwise be left free to wander and lead to distraction. The goal of this series is not to present music as disposable background noise to be mostly ignored or tuned out, but the complete opposite — the goal is to present music that can engulf the listener, carefully selected works that can be fully appreciated (perhaps even enhanced) despite sometimes only having peripheral attention paid to them. To be fully engaged in your own creative or logical challenges, while at the same time fully on board the emotional rails of the musical ideas of another person can make for an experience not dissimilar to meditation. [instrumental transition] But rather than focussing on the simplicity of nothingness while swatting away introspective daydreams, you are engulfed in enough complexity to cause introspective daydreams to burn up on re-entry. Your experience may be different / your milage may vary. [fade to nothingness] [end song]