Im interested in knowing what kind of music? not genre, necessary...but level of familiarity. I learned that I can use a playlist of really otherwise distracting music like pop, but if it's pop that i've heard 100x before, it works as well as background noise. But also with the added benefit of a good beat which helps sometimes to keep me going
You might try searching for something more recent (I joined the site well after that post was made, so I'm sure it's been asked more recently) and/or ask again. I'm not really a hacker. My son suggested I listen to music when I code, which is not a whole lot, and it did help me. But I mostly do other things and, besides, my oldest son tends to have lyric-less music on much of the time that I am home and on the computer (or he's playing a game, which has a similar effect in terms of background noise).
When I'm stressed out, he sometimes intentionally plays the background music from some video game he had when he was a kid. For me, it sets the mood of "all is right with the world because my kids are okay". It's very effective in calming me down. But that's something very specific to me and I can't even tell you the name of the video game (though my son could).
