hckrnws

Sounds cliche, silly, etc. but music really is magic. Such an abstract thing that can produce wide ranges of emotions and even help focus and inspire.

I find a lot of electronic music helpful for coding.

Some bangers for anyone interested:

Age Of Love - The Age Of Love (Charlotte de Witte & Enrico Sangiuliano Remix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVvcTIGy40

Nero - My Eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiojdDs8wwk

SUB FOCUS x WILKINSON @ Corfe Castle, Dorset https://youtu.be/TRh-amAhOEw?si=jCx1V7jkciB3h4kh

Adventure Club - Gold (Ft. Yuna) https://youtu.be/09wdQP1FFR0?si=r7hfA6w3qfhXzL30

DnB is my jam, I’m a fan of sub focus and wilkinson.

Here is 37 hours of DnB [1]. Here is 30 hours of mostly house [2].

[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6a14gkr30nOOr8Eu9T34tE?si=...

[2] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3BUgKCDAWvcDa28MVToIFM?si=...

Big up the DnB crew. I like it dirtier when out, but love a bit of liquid to code to.

For sessions:

Big Bud: Infinity + Infinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYEuCcMZB_o

LTJ Bukem: Logical Progressions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZK_0dgj43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYqDVqYSTxs

And a few select cuts:

Calibre & High Contrast: Mr Majestic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nswe73umPQk

Hybrid Minds / Daughter: Youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RUWkv4Ray8

Hybrid Minds: Touch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AKSpPkZAuE

These replies are fantastic, thanks all.

I recently (last few years) discovered that not only do I like DnB, but there is something about it that keeps the anxiety goblin in my brain occupied the same way one might distract an unruly child with a video game or something equally engaging. Contrast to what the poo-poo'ers say, the organized chaos that it brings to my table actually _helps_ me regain a bit of my higher-order thinking, especially when troubleshooting.

Calibre is a fav, but already mentioned so I offer up another favorite of mine for those looking for something a bit more fluid with a nostalgia kick.

Level Select by Pizza Hotline: https://pizzahotline.bandcamp.com/album/level-select

> the organized chaos that it brings to my table actually _helps_ me regain a bit of my higher-order thinking

Same. My favorite playlist that I made for this is called Break Through The Galaxy [1]. It pushes me to think beyond my boundaries and those boundaries and those boundaries etc.

It’s 50% DnB and 50% other genres of which the songs/tracks hit the same way. For example, it starts with a calm guitar composition.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/track/519POQZ8qXwhqtKzAu1Exp?si=CSV...

Just a heads up, I'm not seeing your playlist when I click the link. Looks like it's linking straight to the track Beauty of Discipline by Gareth Pearson.

Thanks, here it is. I tested the link this time :)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1c3AdAfB4J7iaZ0F9scVC5?si=...

If you like a bit of weird time signature, arpeggios, and seemingly dissonant sounds that eventually harmonize into chaotic outburst you might enjoy what was my coding metronome back in the early 1980s ... YMMV - Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXJWO2FQ16c

YES. Reich is fantastic :)

and then there's Nyman, Michael that is, not Gary ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3KgZlxTz8g is up there with Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds

Pizza Hotline is now getting me through the last bit of Friday. thank you, great stuff.

Yoink!

Liquid DnB is my goto flow state hack:

18 hours spotify playlist of my faves: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2GKgNjMOLu9GYy1puVknIJ?si=...

Only thing to be aware of is that Spotify's shuffle is not a true shuffle, it's a shuffle designed to earn them the most money so you might have noticed the same tracks repeat themselves in a massive playlist, others don't play at all. Unfortunately the solution is to use on of those spotify API websites to dupe the playlist with a shuffle and play it with shuffle disabled.

Fun! I see some overlap. Will check it out :)

I agree music is very useful for switching things up a gear, from down tempo through to very high bpm such as: https://open.spotify.com/album/3f8egS9LhMlx6S3YqJdl3z?si=Fo1...

Interesting, I listened to Tidal Wave by Sub Focus on repeat for like a week while coding!

Such fond memories with this song.

Check out the Heavy Breathing Liquid DnB mix by Dieselboy. It's one of my staples for coding and chilling out in general.

Pass from me - no songs with lyrics for coding, and ever worse belting and melisma...

this site that has been previously posted on HN works well:

https://musicforprogramming.net/

Otherwise agree with psytrance / goa mixes. Techno can be good too if you are tired (eg: Sara Landry, 999999999). Trance can help to uplift if you are depressed. Classical to make you feel more ordered.. I love dubstep in my brain but it creates patterns that are counter-intuitive to doing any work — that genre makes me feel “free”.

Thanks for sharing, I've not seen that site before and this is very much in-line with my own discovery about using music to help with my anxiety. The About blurb really sums it up. Wild, because had anyone presented such claims to me 20 years ago, I would have waved them away as bullpucky peddlers. Now, DnB + other electronic genres are dosed daily while at work through my headphones and I'm better for it.

Interesting that dubstep makes you feel free! I would not describe my experience like that, but it does tend to raise my aggression a bit, so I usually avoid it unless its crunch time. Your comment has me wondering about different experiences than mine. My DnB picks are more soothing to me, but sound too chaotic and "all over the place" for my wife's ADHD.

In addition to musicforprogramming episodes, Colours of Ektoplazm is a 5 hour mix of goodness (great for focusing on a plane): https://ektoplazm.com/free-music/dj-basilisk-the-colours-of-...

The latest episode is extraordinary!

Don't forget Poolside FM.

I do still actively wonder what portion of the effects are real vs placebo in audio "treatments". I'm not certain I am sold on things like binaural beats and such, but I do believe that pleasing music that relaxes the brain for a person can be real. It's just highly person dependent. One persons calming effect with hard rock is another person's anxiety source. Would be incredible if it allowed for better understanding of this.

I was regularly surprised how music could restore 'colors' in my emotions even in the darkest times. Quite mind-blowing that something that looks completely abstract and removed from evolutionary advantage could have so much impact.

Binaural beats usage has worked pretty well for me in the past. Maybe think of it as the most pure form music (from a functional perspective) can take.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44258339

This article’s title, subtitle, summary, and first two paragraphs all contain some version of the phrase “reshapes your brains internal networks in real time.” I thought I was going crazy after I read the same thing six times.

Title authors rarely pick "title, subtitle, summary", editors do.

It makes sense that the title and summary would restate the same thing - the main point of the article.

And what you considered as the first paragraph (in calling out "first two paragraphs") is in fact what's called a pull-out, an extract of the article that's also in the body (a part that sums something up, a quote, etc).

Sometimes the reason for such duplication is that those serve different purposes in different views (main post page vs listing vs RSS feed vs archive vs picture grid article list vs the mobile "responsive" layout, etc).

The problem here is that the layout is badly designed: the summary could be ommited, and the pull-out shouldn't appear on top of the article, with minimal distinction (just larger type and italics) but preferably in a box somewhere further down for those skimming the post.

Yeah, it is insane. They are also contain a little to no other information, so you kinda read the same thing six times, each time hoping to get some additional bits of information and each time getting nothing.

edit: BTW I still didn't find what does it mean for brain to "reconfigure". The whole article doesn't say it. What a shame.

Related tangent - here's my carefully-curated "flowstate" Spotify playlist consisting of tracks w/ no lyrics and a variety of moods. I pick one that suits me in the moment and put it on repeat. I find it boosts my focus and energy and is very helpful in attaining flowstate, for problem-solving or Cal Newport-style "deep work" sessions.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...

I've always thought of songs with human vocals as cries of conspecifics, impossible to ignore and thus highly distracting.

Not sure if that’s because I’m not a native speaker, but unless I make a conscious and quite tiresome effort to listen to the lyrics, the human voice is just another instrument among many.

A little better link here with a link to the detailed article, too.

https://health.au.dk/en/display/artikel/dansende-hjerneboelg...

Meanwhile, it's interesting that I do find I can focus deeper on code with certain types of music. I also have certain music I listen to when I want to write a document, such as a PRFAQ or some narrative. I've always assumed I was just "programming" myself for these modes, and the music was reminding me of the mode I was in. Perhaps it's a little of both.

Assuming that we don't perceive "real reality" but rather a complex model of it, they say what we call sound comes closest to real reality.

Assuming everything is energy then the sensor picks up on different attributes of the signal. Reality is the signal, the scatter is noise, the parts with order (music) are the message.

While we don't perceive "real reality" either with our senses or abstractions from them, and likewise often are just perceiving complex abstract models of reality, I think we also do have the ability to experience (but not perceive) reality directly. To your point though, I do think sound is closer to an experience than a perception and therefore more real and less abstract.

We're very literally unable to perceive "real reality" per se. All we can ever perceive are the effects that reality has on our senses, along with any "side-effects" caused by the differences in one person's sensory system compared to another (personalized complex model).

green-needle/brain-storm would disagree with you!

Did this reconfig-by-sound a lot in college using binaural beats. While others use coffee and other chemicals I'd just pop in my earphones and play a beat sequence for whatever the needed purpose, whether extreme focus, a power nap, enhanced creativity, etc. Worked pretty well, though I'd feel nuked for a while after extended usage.

There's a specific frequency of brain waves which are always correlated with wakeful consciousness. I never looked up whether 'binaural' stuff is normal in that same freq range or the lower ranges. The lower freq ranges are still present even during unconsciousness (or anesthesia), and so focusing the brain on those frequencies would either 1) help concentration or 2) help sleep? I'm not sure which.

How exactly did you feel afterwards? Could you list the different beat patterns (or link to an example) and the result?

Especially power nap lol

It's a bit hard to describe: a kind of extremely worn out and braindead feeling. But that's usually after using it for several hours on end. The brain just isn't designed to be forced into a particular state for extended periods I guess.

My goto was the Gnaural app[0], but it's been a dead project for some time. Still have the app on my phone though, in case I want to do quick dives. There are other implementations and also audio files out there, but I never found anything as good for my use case.

[0] https://gnaural.sourceforge.net/

BrainWave advance binaural programs is probably very similar, has different tracks implying the desired effect. Some of them definitely help with what they arr supposed to, morning coffee and deep relaxation are consistent with their naming

https://www.banzailabs.com/binaural-brainwave-entrainment-ap...

Websites a bit old skool but its legit

There's very little in the article about "how" sound reshapes "networks" in the brain. It's pretty reasonable to expect that hearing different sounds can cause different neurons to fire, though (considering you can upload information into somebody's brain by talking to them).

The important discovery is not that sensory experiences correlate strongly with specific areas of the brain. That's been known for decades. What I think is possibly new here is that the musical waves are genuinely getting "in sync" (temporally). Neuron firing is too slow for this to happen due to the normal conventional interpretation of how the brain works, which is that info travels from synapse to synapse. It essentially disproves the "calculational" (synapse based) model of consciousness, and it proves that even qualia itself is based on waves.

Sure it's possible that something akin to simple harmonic oscillator spontaneous synchronization could be happening (i.e. this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RYeNu159Sgc) but even if this 'dumb' sync is playing a role it still isn't evidence against the wave-based nature of qualia.

"Music is a delight for the soul, an echo of the divine, binding time together—past, present, and future."

-- St. Augustine

Music makes your brain work in an interesting way, keeping track of this memory/current flow/anticipation of time in a non-visual and often non-verbal way.

Always a nice chance to recommend http://mynoise.net (and https://mynoise.pro/)

There are combination of frequencies, tempo, volume, shortly specific music that acts as psychotropic agent on me, altering the way my mind works for the duration of the song. I am the type laughing at trance and meditation and other hyped-in-certain-circles blabla, but what I feel then may be something related.

  "Music is to me proof of the existence of god
  It is so extraordinarily full of magic
  And, and in tough times of my life
  I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"
  - 1 Giant Leap - Daphne

I don’t know about others but I felt like this article is so high level that it didn’t explain anything at all.

Here’s a link to the paper:

https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ad...

Also here if you don't like Wiley:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40211612/

A while back someone on this site posted a link to a music channel that fused the sound of an SFPD police dispatcher with an ecclectic mix of low-key electronic type music. Can't find it since but really liked it. Anyone here know what i'm describing?

Should be this: https://youarelistening.to/

No actually. I remember that it was a green/black sort of site color scheme, but no worries, thanks for this. It's pretty damn good!

Are you talking about soma.fm?

https://somafm.com/sf1033/

Bingo. This was the exact link. I'd bookmarked the wider Soma.fm page, but it has many channels, so I didn't see this specific one and its layout as I remembered it, but now that you led me directly to it, thanks.

mpv https://somafm.com/sf1033.pls on the cli will make that work

Exact one I remembered, as I responded to another comment above. Thanks a lot for taking a moment to share it.

Does this mean that people who claim listening different sound frequencies can heal you were not wrong? If sound does have a profound effect like that, those changes in brain might effect other things as well.

There has being quite bit research about how cells NOT only communicate biochemically, also via sounds and bio-photons. EMF is not that far of stretch either.

Any links / pointers on further reading? Would love to read more on this.

Is this why i can focus on coding so much better when listening to psytrance/goa?

I can recommend dub techno for coding, works a treat for me at least. Nice and steady, relatively fast tempo but not too aggressive or intrusive. And crucially, no lyrics, which I find distracting when coding or writing.

I prefer classical music for this. Not "Flight of the bumblebee" type stuff, more like Adagio for Strings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQsgE0L450

I’ve always thought it was funny how the two situations for listening to edm were so different:

- alone doing intensely focused work

- in a huge crowd dancing and definitely NOT doing work

Yes. The paper found 2.4 Hz frequencies to be the secret sauce which is 144 BPM and in pystrance/goa range. I would guess that is common freq range for lfos and modulations as well.

I do the same. It is strange how psytrance/goa helps as external noise to drown out other distractions and so focus can be rationed.

I've found a bit of caffeine and some Astral Projection ideal for this. Care to share any favorite artists?

Not an artist per se but the app Endel is this continuous generated music with different "scenarios" for... well... different scenarios. IMO the full continuity is a game changer for focus.

I work in neurotech with auditory stimulation, so you'd think I'd be a big fan of this area of research, and I think the authors have done a decent job of suggesting the limitations, but the title itself gets picked up and people read a lot into what they think this is saying. Or maybe I'm just a bit jaded.

They provide a 2.4 Hz stimulus and then measure frequency-matched activity across brain networks. They suggest some novel methods of measuring how the signal traverses the brain, but they don't suggest why it does, which is good. They do say this is unlikely to be entrainment, I'll get into that more in a bit.

We shouldn't be surprised that auditory stimulation produces frequency-matched activity across distributed brain regions. The auditory system naturally routes information across multiple interconnected networks. The auditory system picks it up, but the auditory system is also not siloed into a single area of the brain. No brain systems are, we have replication, and this is just showing the the nervous system is passing the signal throughout the brain. In no way does it suggest that this is related to thought, consciousness, focus, or that these frequency-matched responses reflect any functional change in brain state.

When people talk about entrainment, that is a real thing. But the word itself describes when systems synchronize, not that they will.

I guess I'm cautious about papers like these because of our work in neurostimulation and sleep where we use phase-targeted auditory stimulation to enhance slow-wave activity. Basically increasing sleep's restorative function.

In our work it isn't this sort of "gentle tones to help you sleep", or "activating networks to alter brain activity", which is an area I see a lot of snake-oil and nonsense.

The way closed-loop phase-targeted slow-wave enhancement works is by "interrupting" the brain during the synchronous firing of neurons, which (it is believed) triggers a protective mechanism in the brain and as a response, the brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. We're talking about very short (50ms) interruptions.

I get my back up a bit when I hear about this idea that reading electrical activity of the brain and making broad assumptions about what they "mean". I've been invited to speak on a panel July 2nd with Australia's Commissioner of Human Rights to discuss ethical safety around EEG data, and while I do believe we need to protect bio-data, I don't believe in the "electrical activity means we can read or alter your thoughts" camp.

If you want to know more about our work, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com, and if you're in Sydney, and want to come to the talk, I can't find a link atm, but it's at the Sydney Knowledge Hub on July 2nd., part of the Sydney Neurotech Meetup

Maybe you would know or have an opinion. I see a lot of articles about rewiring your brain. For instance, the affects from meditation, or book reading. And how those things can rewire your brain. But does it matter? If it's relatively simple rewire your brain(simple as in, doing an activity for several months). It appears to me, that your brain adapts, and that adaptation is normal. Struggling to completely put this idea into words, but isn't this more like saying, 'if you lift this weight your muscles grow!', and then selling that as if its some sort of miracle?

Neurons definitely re-wire, or just wire/connect. Meditation, creates an understanding of how we can "control" or monitor our thoughts. Reading creates understanding.

Yes, if you lift the weight, muscle will grow. If you look at or think about the weight, studies suggest, muscles will also grow.

But I'm cautious to not conflate "we see electrical activity" to "we have re-wired the brain".

Meditation changes the electrical activity, but we don't put an electrical signal into the brain and end up with meditation. We can kinda force the brain into a meditative state with magnetic stimulation, but we're talking about some really powerful stuff, and I think some would argue that we aren't actually creating a meditative state if we were to do this. Note: I haven't looked into this too deeply.

The way I look at it, we are just really clever apes. We keep thinking we understand how the brain/body/consciousness works, but every time we discover another layer of science and understanding, we look back at our previous understanding and think how naive we were. I think this is the same.

We used to literally think we understood how the body worked by "balancing the 4 humours". We understood how blood delivered oxygen to muscles and nutrients and we thought "oh, I get it, it's a big pump, and we pump this blood stuff around and that's how it works". Then we discovered electricty, slapped our collective foreheads and went "OH!! Of course, it's electric! electricity contracts the pump, oh, and look at these thing in the brain! They're electric too!! I get it".

Soon, we'll go through this whole process again and realize that the electrical activity wasn't wrong, but was naive, and I suspect the process will repeat again, and again.

https://strudel.cc/ for if you want to make your own

This is amazing, thanks

This is why I use Instagram on silent. I don't want them to influence me too much.

Love to research utilizing tFUS - much cheaper and scalable than magnets!

music is the category of all possible languages, is a statement I've been mulling lately. it's less of an aesthetic judgment than the usual, "music is a language," where it's more of a comment on encoding.

I'd suggest the capacity for our brains and minds to apprehend shapes, relationships, patterns, and ultimately symbols is made from its ability to parse the category of things in music. time, difference, harmonics, consonance, dissonance, patterns. as though all the symbols and representations that emerge from our chunking and caching of stimuli into patterns are in a category of logical artefacts. we represent them- and relationships between them- as musical. Maths codifies or encodes these same relationships and artefacts, but the underlying objects aren't just abstractions, they are a measurement of essentially "musical" relationships.

it falls a bit for the "everything is X" fallacy, but if people seriously pursue the premise that our brains compute, then plausibly, the stimulus it computes over is this category of possible languages we call "music." not sure how useful the idea is, but it's pretty.

[dead]

I’ve always felt that certain sounds or music really affect how focused I am. Background noise from a café, for example, actually helps me concentrate and makes writing feel easier.

It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Makes me want to experiment more and see if sound can actually “tune” the brain to boost focus or improve mood.

That has to do with the noise floor being higher than silence where you hear every details.

Also it's noisy but you know no one isn't going to interrupt you which is why you can work there but not in a noisy office. Subconsciously you're flowing without having split attention.

[dead]

This is also direct evidence that qualia/consciousness is made of waves, not computations. The Neural Net "wiring" of the human brain is mostly I/O signal routing for various sensory input data and motor neuron output. The convolutions and special 3D shapes in the brain are actually working more like "resonator" circuits (literally like radios), and I'm convinced even memory is not stored "locally" but spread out across all past brains via entanglement and quantum waves (see. "Block Universe" and/or "Eternalism").

This viewpoint means when you remember something from the past that's actually a quantum wave effect where your current brain automatically "finds" and gets energy from the closest matching prior state. This would be like a opera singer singing a pitch to find a hidden wine glass that will resonate at that frequency. This lookup/retrieval mechanism requires no wires or direct contact, but only waves. However I think qualia is built of 'probability waves' and that's how they manage to travel faster than light to go out and find "matching memories", because probability waves are not "real" (no mass) and therefore not subject to the speed of light limitations.