I did not seek out extreme metal because I wanted increasingly extreme music. I accidentally optimized my work music until screaming became a feature.
The Open Office Link to heading
Open offices are built on the idea that removing walls makes people collaborate. It mostly makes them audible.
I could hear the secretary answering call after call. I could hear a salesperson relentlessly cold calling businesses. I could hear every nearby conversation, whether or not anyone involved had spoken to me. One coworker made “I’M ALL JACKED UP ON MOUNTAIN DEW” from Talladega Nights his text notification. It was funny the first few times.
All of this was happening while I was trying to hold a program in my head. A stray conversation could evict half the call stack.
Headphones became mandatory. The choice was never music versus perfect silence. It was music versus a room full of intelligible speech, ringing phones, and a tiny NASCAR fan screaming from someone’s pocket.
Removing the Lyrics Link to heading
Music covered the office, but lyrics created a smaller version of the same problem. If I could understand the words, my brain would listen to them. That is not especially useful while reading documentation, naming things, or remembering why a boolean was inverted three methods ago.
Apparently my brain can parse only one poorly documented language at a time.
So I removed the lyrics.
I listened to classical music, electronic music, jazz, and anything else that could fill the room without attempting to tell me a story. Bach worked. So did Four Tet, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Bonobo, and Squarepusher. Post rock was almost purpose built for this. Russian Circles, Mogwai, Tortoise, Explosions in the Sky, Pelican, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor could build an entire landscape without asking the language processing part of my brain to participate.
Shoegaze Was the Gateway Drug Link to heading
Shoegaze found a loophole.
It technically has lyrics, but the vocals are often buried inside layers of guitars, reverb, and distortion. The singer is present. The words are more of a rumor.
Slowdive, Whirr, DIIV, and bands around that sound fit into the same mental slot as instrumental music. I could hear a voice without automatically parsing a sentence. Shoegaze became the bridge between music with no vocals and music with vocals that did not behave like language.
Foreign language music worked for the same reason. If I did not understand the words, the voice became another instrument. Research published much later would find that lyrics interfere more with reading when the lyrics and the text use the same language. I arrived at roughly the same result through the rigorous scientific method of being annoyed at work.
That left one obvious optimization.
Screaming Is Basically a Foreign Language Link to heading
Metal growls are vocals, but they rarely interrupt me with recognizable sentences. Extreme metal solved the lyrical interference problem while adding considerably more energy than Bach.
The progression was gradual:
- Classical, electronic music, and jazz
- Post rock
- Shoegaze and foreign language music
- Metal
- Extreme metal with band names and song titles I cannot display during a meeting
My listening history now starts with Deafheaven and Panopticon, followed closely by Russian Circles and Whirr. Farther down are Agalloch, Opeth, White Ward, Alcest, MØL, Drudkh, Blood Incantation, Blut aus Nord, Rivers of Nihil, and other bands that are difficult to recommend during a normal workplace conversation.
I started with Bach because music without lyrics helped me concentrate. I arrived at extreme metal by following that requirement to its logical conclusion.
Spotify Operational Security Link to heading
I hide this from my coworkers. Not because I am ashamed of the music. I just do not want to explain an extreme metal band name to someone who asked for help with a spreadsheet.
I close Spotify before sharing my screen. This is part of the checklist now. Close chat windows. Close Spotify before it reveals an album cover that converts a routine pull request discussion into a meeting with Human Resources.
When someone asks what I listen to, “mostly instrumental music” is accurate enough. It describes Russian Circles perfectly and becomes progressively more technical as the vocals approach a growl.
Remote work fixed most of this. Nobody is cold calling a regional plumbing supplier six feet from my desk. No phone loudly announces its owner’s Mountain Dew status.
Unfortunately, There Is Research Link to heading
I treated this whole thing as a joke for years, but the research mostly agrees with the pipeline.
A survey of 2,242 professional software developers found that developers commonly listen to music to block background noise and regulate their mood. They reported listening more often while writing code or doing repetitive tasks, and less often during code review or while learning something new. That matches my experience. Music is great when I know where I am going. Difficult debugging still gets the pause button. (Barton et al., 2019)
A systematic review covering 95 articles and 154 experiments found that music with lyrics was more detrimental than instrumental music, particularly for memory and reading comprehension. Instrumental music was less disruptive, although it could still impair difficult tasks. The conclusion is not that understandable lyrics consume some of the same limited resources as language heavy work. (Cheah et al., 2022)
A later experiment compared silence, lyrical music, and instrumental lo-fi music. Lyrics impaired verbal memory, visual memory, and reading comprehension by about 0.3 standard deviations. Instrumental music produced no credible improvement or impairment. Less distracting is not the same as smarter, but less distracting is useful when the alternative is an open office. (Souza and Barbosa, 2023)
The foreign language step has evidence too. A 2024 study found that reading comprehension suffered most when the lyrics used the same language as the written material. Native language lyrics were generally more disruptive than second language lyrics or silence. (Du et al., 2024)
Nobody in these studies tested whether unintelligible shrieking from an atmospheric black metal album improves C# performance. There are apparently still gaps in the literature.
Spotify Versus AI Link to heading
I have joked that Spotify has increased my productivity more than AI has. After looking at the research, I am not sure it is entirely a joke.
AI saves time in obvious chunks. It writes a function, explains an unfamiliar API, or finds something I missed. Music works at a lower level. It gets me into the chair, keeps me there, and makes a tedious afternoon slightly less tedious. That is difficult to measure, but I have been doing it for most of my career. Small improvements add up when you repeat them for decades.
Going Full Circle Link to heading
Coding agents have also started reversing the pipeline. Tools like Claude Code handle more of the mechanical typing now while I spend more time directing and reviewing.
Somewhere along the way I started listening to lyrics again. I freed up enough language processing capacity for Aesop Rock. Unfortunately, this may require more capacity than the code did.
He has already summarized our approach to technological problems:
That’s technology, innovate a difference
A feat of engineering, a system made efficient
There isn’t a condition, complication, or revision
Where the answer ain’t to build a more sophisticated widget
Aesop Rock, “Mindful Solutionism”
I spent decades finding music I could ignore so I could concentrate on writing code. Now I have outsourced some of the programming to a robot so I can finally pay attention to what everyone has been yelling about.