| In addition to the "about" page, the secret "episode zero" explains more about the philosophy behind the series. I have no idea about the science (or lack thereof) behind it, but it certainly matches my experience and my own sense of why I'm easily able to enter a state of flow while coding along to it. Here's a transcript of what I can decipher from the robot voice: -------------- (WARNING: PRETENTIOUSNESS) While concentrating on complex tasks or creative work, we often feed ourselves streams of musical information in an attempt to occupy the parts of our minds that would otherwise be left relatively idle. Without this, under prolonged periods of concentration, those other active brain centers create a sense of imbalance. It can often create distracting interjections from powerfully oblique thoughts about food, memories, desires, and emotions. Using music in this way is nothing new, but for the wrong choices we can often find ourselves fighting against thematic intent to such a degree as to almost denigrate the music itself. We train ourselves to tune out ??? what we've chosen to be background noise. The goal of this series is to provide listening experiences that can be fully appreciated for their artistic intent despite sometimes having only partial attention paid to them. That is not to say that the music is not worthy of exclusive attention, but that it contains themes or textures of a certain type that the problem solving brain centers won't have trouble processing and fully appreciating while attempting to code, write, or draw. In other words, the music itself should not task the listener with too much problem solving ???. The musical ideas developed will cover large thematic and emotional distances, but rarely in such a short space of time as to sound dramatic. The back-and-forth motion between contemplation of the next stage of your work and the subsequent actions to realize it will necessarily create peaks and troughs in brain activity. This series attempts to provide a soundtrack that can be fully appreciated at the level of entire ???. More importantly, the episodes have been lovingly crafted by people who have invested huge chunks of their lives finding all this beautiful stuff ???. |