"Hey. As a continuation of the last post, I want to talk about music. For the time being, I thought that music affects people with varying degrees of distraction. I keep hearing two opposite opinions: - Music is distracting; - Music helps to focus. I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle: I think that __songs__ distract much more than instrumental music. ••• It's the case at least for me; I don't know how it works for you. For me, if there are not just songs but also vocal samples or some samples mixed with a vocal synth, it grabs my attention __instantly__. Really, it just flips a switch in my brain, and 70% of my attention immediately focuses on the sound. It's so strange. It's the complete opposite with instrumental music. Not any specific genre — I won't argue about music tastes because that's pointless. Either music taste exists, or it doesn't. I'm joking, sorry :D ••• Well, yeah. Instrumental music. And this is interesting! I found this study -> click. Even though it has a small sample size, the answers and results sound pretty familiar to my empirical experience 🤔 A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a ""Music for Coding"" playlist on Apple Music and clicked on it without checking the content. It was just... full of Drake and other songs. I'm just curious — __How The Heck Can Someone Code While Listening To These Full Of ""Some Sense"" Tracks?__ If you can, react with the 🎹 emojie to this post. I can not. ••• Another interesting thing is that playing drums helped autistic teenagers significantly reduce hyperactivity and inattention difficulties. But I don't play drums, and I'm not autistic ❌. I do love listening to drums while studying or working intensely. For a long time, I listened to music with strict drum parts, like minimal techno. When I got terribly bored with it, I switched to extremely neuro bassy DNB stuff. When I was burned out from working in DevOps outsourcing, I switched over to slamming deathcore bands ⚰️ No understandable words yet 🤣 So, the BPM of the drums doesn't really matter. It seems that the drums matter, and the __""gaps"" __ between these drums. ••• And still, perfect silence is better if one can focus without jumping around browser tabs procrastinating. The problem is... It's so hard to find this silence. Such silence is impossible in group offices, and such silence is not possible when working remotely from home if you have kids or a construction site just across your window. I'm building up now a great (to my taste) playlist for programming, without words (99%) and mostly consisting of cinematic music, minor dub (like ""Kryptic Minds""), and more intense electronic stuff (like ""The Algorithm""). And it's working so well so far. Will share it later."