"I find productive music to almost always lack vocals."

Languages you don't speak also work.

I'll echo this sentiment. Been listening to a lot of music from Mali and being really productive with it on. Highly recommend Khaira Arby, Ali Farka Touré and Amadou & Mariam.

Thanks for this list, I went through everything you listed and found a few new albums which fit my coding music tastes.

Along the the same lines as fumar's suggestions, I recommend:

1. Music from Braid (yes, the video game)

2. Black Swan (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

3. The Social Network Soundtrack

Inception OST is insane too. Live long, Hans Zimmer!

I think you would like everything from Bonobo. Warning: addictive - I often keep his new albums on repeat for many weeks.

I created a Spotify playlist with all of these albums (except Boards of Canada and Nico Muhly, not available):

http://open.spotify.com/user/ryan.aidan/playlist/5ot3B9EqCZF...

Check out Tycho, which is available on Spotify. Similar to BoC and also excellent.

Thanks! I will use it myself. Spotify is lacking some great music, that includes BoC. But, in general, I find myself using it more than I thought.

Shameless plug. I released an EP recently. I will be honest only two tracks are, what I consider, finished work. Track 2 and 5. But, still learning... fantasmafigueroa.bandcamp.com

Would like to add the Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alvo Noto collaborations as well as the pole Red, Blue, Yellow albums to this!

We enforce this in the rules on our communal listening site, http://codingsoundtrack.org -- we like to think it's something to do with that part of our brains already being dedicated to understanding computer language.

I usually put 2 or 3 quiet electronic/trip-hop songs in my playlist and then I use the last.fm similar tracks to fill up the playlist, works quite well:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/177896/WP_Shot.PNG

try these https://soundcloud.com/shawndumas/likes

Got some of those in your list myself. More to include: 1) Eno - Music for Airports <br> 2) Kaen - Interworlds 3) Shulman - Random Thoughts. It's too engrossing the first few times. After that, pretty good for background music.

> I find productive music to almost always lack vocals.

This agrees with generally accepted psychological models. The mind is totally single-threaded in language processing/parsing (compared to incredible parallelism in spatial processing).

This is why I don't understand you can hear voices in the coffitivity vocals, you need music not to catch some (parts of) sentences here and there. I do like it so far though, on the note of music that is nice to code to try out Pretty Lights.

Thanks. I will try it out.

Instrumental/lack of vocals also helps me. I mostly listen to post rock - godspeed you!black emperor, pelican, mogwai.

Carbon Based Lifeforms