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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Music and Creativity

To me music is an essen­tial part of the cre­ative flow. In short: no music,
no cre­ativ­ity. But I won­der — do some gen­res of music lead to more cre­ativ­ity
than oth­ers? I guess it all boils down to per­sonal pref­er­ence. A num­ber of peo­ple
might go all cre­ative lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal music or jazz, oth­ers might pre­fer
some more alter­na­tive styles or even heavy metal. I tend to have fre­quent atmos­phere
or mood swings as to what music I lis­ten to, with each hav­ing it’s own
par­tic­u­lar style.

Per­son­ally, while work­ing, I enjoy ambi­ent music and trip hop, mixed with jazz
and occa­sion­ally some elec­tro or house. My favorite stream­ing chan­nels come
from the folks at Soma
FM and Net­musique.
Soma FM’s Secret Agent stream is lovely and I enjoy the short sound clips
inbe­tween songs from movies such as James Bond and Ocean Eleven. Close to bed­time
I switch to Soma FM’s Beat Blender to relax and enjoy the mix. Most of
the time I have either one of these stream­ing chan­nels play­ing. So what music
do you lis­ten to while work­ing? Any streams I should add to my favorites?

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Friday, March 5th, 2004.

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12 comments on “Music and Creativity”

  1. Posted by Steven on Friday, March 5th, 2004.

    im a hiphop/r&b fanatic, but i dont lis­ten to it whilst design­ing. I tend do lis­ten to any­thing that has a nice smooth melody and beat, it helps me con­cen­trate as my gen­eral musi­cal choice just dis­tracts me.

    –peace

  2. Posted by Andrew Dunning on Friday, March 5th, 2004.

    I must say that I like hav­ing cham­ber music to work to, because (as the last poster said) it’s usu­ally pretty smooth, and nobody com­plains about it. Some of the really old stuff (like Biber) is par­tic­u­larly great, as well as most Baroque and some Clas­si­cal. A lot of the newer clas­si­cal (esp. Roman­tic) music has too many dynam­ics to work to with­out being scared, though (I speak from experience).

    For streams, I like Most­ly­Clas­si­cal. If you use iTunes, it’s already in the Radio under Classical.

  3. Posted by Nils T. Devine on Friday, March 5th, 2004.

    Let me sec­ond the vote for clas­si­cal. No dis­tract­ing lyrics, but intel­lec­tu­ally and emo­tion­ally stim­u­lat­ing. There’s a local (LA) radio sta­tion here that plays clas­si­cal 24/7. In fact, there’s a Yo-Yo Ma con­cert on right now stream­ing at kusc.org

  4. Posted by Chris Vincent on Friday, March 5th, 2004.

    I lis­ten to many vari­eties of music, but right now I’m a met­al­head; From Autumn To Ashes, Thrice, Sys­tem of a Down, Kill­switch Engage, and Soil­work fre­quent my playlists. How­ever, it often dis­tracts me whilst doing work. So, when I’m work­ing, I usu­ally switch to some nice, abstract elec­tron­ica by the likes of Autechre or Aphex Twin. Cake with its groovi­ness and Dash­board Con­fes­sional with its angst are also good choices when I just need to think.

  5. Posted by soxiam on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.

    I for one is still stuck in the 90’s. For con­cept or pro­to­type design, I observe absolute silence. For nor­mal work flow, my iTunes is usu­ally crank­ing out Fugazi, Lung­fish, The Nation of Ulysses, Aminia­ture, Por­tishead, Mas­sive Attack, Drop Nine­teens, Grandaddy… although mind­less trance music is nice when you’re crunch­ing out the codes.

  6. Posted by Johan Sahlén on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.

    I’m a huge Tool fan myself, though I don’t lis­ten to them while work­ing cre­atively, as it is some­how too involv­ing and dis­tracts me from the work at hand. I pre­fer some­thing more mel­low when work­ing (be it design­ing or cod­ing), like Maynard’s other band, A Per­fect Cir­cle, or some Smash­ing Pumpkins.

  7. Posted by Eby on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.

    I also tend to go with the SomaFM streams though I lis­ten mostly to the Indie Pop Rocks stream. I can see the argue­ments some have with lyrics being dis­tract­ing, but I find that only hap­pens with songs I know, which is rare on SomaFM. Even the rock songs turn into ambi­ent music for me. If the lyrics became a prob­lem I prob­a­bly would turn to another SomaFM chan­nel such as Drone Zone or Beat Blender. I’ve lis­tened to many inter­net streams over the years and I keep com­ing back to Soma.

  8. Posted by Paul on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.

    Groove Salad. It’s basi­cally my whole CD col­lec­tion on ran­dom repeat.

  9. Posted by Virginia on Saturday, March 6th, 2004.

    When I was a teenager, I used to work all the time to music — any kind of music, but mostly jazz, since that’s what I was into. I did all my high­school study with head­phones on. My mum used to say that she couldn’t believe I could lis­ten to music and con­cen­trate all the time, and that as she’d got older, she’d found it almost impos­si­ble to do. I scoffed. Now, as I get older, I find it harder and harder to work with dis­trac­tions. When I’m just doing design work — mock­ing up sites, or work­ing in Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor or InDe­sign — music’s okay. But as soon as I get into the code, or writ­ing or edit­ing, the music goes off. My mum, as usual, was right. On the other hand, music is a real source of inspi­ra­tion, and when I’m not actively work­ing, I’m lis­ten­ing to it all the time, all sorts of stuff.

  10. Posted by Andrew on Sunday, March 7th, 2004.

    I have to agree with you. If I’m on my com­puter and don’t have

    music run­ning, I accom­plish noth­ing. Kind of like right now, the TV is on in the back­ground and I’m sup­pose to be writ­ing a report on mon­keys, but no music is on so I’ll just site here blog­ging instead of doing my 7 page paper.

    I enjoy many types of music. My favorite would have to be Alternative-Rock and my least favorite is Coun­try (no excep­tions, Cash isn’t coun­try!). I gen­er­ally tend to stray away from most pop (espe­cially pop-punk) and Rap, but I occa­sion­ally find a Chris­t­ian pop artist that I enjoy and I do enjoy Eminem. I’ll lis­ten to punk every now and again but after about 20 min­utes it all sounds the same (except for Green Day and Off­spring). Jazz is begin­ning to tickle my fancy; I’ll have to grow into it more. I can take techno from time to time, not in large doses, but I can take it.

    The old music scene has started to catch my eye is well, and I’ve picked up more old music then recently then new music.Bands mim­ic­k­ing old music are always good (such as Poly­phonic Sprees and The Music of Our Lives). It reas­sures me that our music hasn’t lost class com­pletely. I per­son­ally don’t not like clas­si­cal music, but I never lis­ten to it. It makes me feel like noth­ing is hap­pen­ing and makes me sleep­ing dur­ing the day and rest­less at night.

  11. Posted by Veerle Pieters on Sunday, March 7th, 2004.

    Music is a great moti­va­tor, espe­cially if it is a gray day out­side I tend to lis­ten to chill-house and imag­ine myself being on the beach. A great online radio sta­tion is Music One (http://www.m1live.com). For the rest I mostly lis­ten to Naked Music from San Fran­cisco, their Nude Dimen­sions series are top class. Also Nude Tempo One mixed by Miguel Migs is a great cd to start the inspi­ra­tion juices. You can lis­ten to a com­pi­la­tion of that cd on my blog btw. Café del Mar, the famous beach bar on Ibiza, their DJ Bruno has mixed one of finest chill house tunes out there. The com­pi­la­tion is called Chill­house mix One, Two and Three.

  12. Posted by Paul G on Monday, March 8th, 2004.

    Depends on the mood, the day, the work, the weather…

    Mind-numbing repet­i­tive work gen­er­ally requires some­thing rowdy to keep the atten­tion level up. Lately, Flog­ging Molly and The Pil­lows have been good pick-me-ups.

    Heavy cod­ing and debug­ging requires Rage Against the Machine, or some­thing equally angry. It tends to match my mood when my pro­gram crashes inex­plic­a­bly for the thou­sandth time. In fact, I hardly lis­ten to this sort of music at all unless I’m elbow deep in a com­pli­cated project.

    Design and light pro­gram­ming gen­er­ally goes well with melan­choly or chill music. Cold­play, older Jimmy Eat World, and The Black Keys have all got­ten a lot of time in my playlist, although Queens of the Stone Age some­times works well here.

    If it’s a nice day (and we’ve had a string of them lately), most of the other rules don’t apply. I’ll open the win­dows and play some­thing very mel­low and laid-back that makes me think of the beach. Jack John­son is usu­ally my first choice, but Guster, Weezer, and Mofro often make the list as well.

    Work right before bed is often accom­pa­nied by some good ol’ Van Mor­ri­son. ‘Astral Weeks’ is a par­tic­u­lar favorite