What types of music – genres, bands, composers – are best for programming?
The well-known “Mozart effect” suggests that listening to the great man’s music can improve your concentration and help you to make intuitive leaps… making his music perfect for programming to, surely? The study itself has been brought into question, but besides, Mozart doesn’t always hit the right note (so to speak). Programming isn’t just a single activity – different tasks take a different type of thought, so it follows that each needs a different style of music to nudge your brain into the right gear.
For those in a slightly trippy, Java annotation-mapping kind of place, I can recommend Psapp’s little-known album Tiger, My Friend. It’s an unconventional mix of (I assume) whatever object-that-makes-a-sound happened to be nearby while they were recording, put to acoustic rhythmic effect overlaid with sultry vocals; the result is somewhere between Penguin Café Orchestra and Frou Frou, in other words quite surreal, and it’s perfect for meta-programming.
