It's 2019 -- let's get past the antiquated stereotypes of flighty musicians and rigid software developers. These ideas don't represent the crossover between technology and the arts; in fact, they ignore that music plays a large part in the lives of many software professionals. In this session, we'll explore the connections between software and music, including how tunes can enhance situations as diverse as heads down production time and the bonding of highly collaborative development teams. We'll also demo some programming languages that create digital music, in order to see a fully realized combination of code and melodies. Whether you're a garage rock aficionado or a Beethoven fan, attending this session will give you plenty of ways to harness your inner artist to improve focus, creativity, and thought process in day-to-day work environments.
18. Share Proudly show off your work
Explore Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Reflect Look back at your past work regularly
Improve Constantly move your definition of perfect
Train Practice like a musician does
19. Share Proudly show off your work
Explore Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Reflect Look back at your past work regularly
Improve Constantly move your definition of perfect
Train Practice like a musician does
20. Share Proudly show off your work
Explore Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Reflect Look back at your past work regularly
Improve Constantly move your definition of perfect
Train Practice like a musician does
21. Share Proudly show off your work
Explore Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Reflect Look back at your past work regularly
Improve Constantly move your definition of perfect
Train Practice like a musician does
22. Share Proudly show off your work
Explore Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Reflect Look back at your past work regularly
Improve Constantly move your definition of perfect
Train Practice like a musician does
49. Contact: brett.berliner@insight.com / @brettberliner
Slide Deck: https://www.slideshare.net/BrettBerliner
Music Benefits the Brain: https://wakeup-world.com/2015/03/19/how-music-benefits-the-
brain/
Music & Mental Health: https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/December-2016/The-
Impact-of-Music-Therapy-on-Mental-Health
Sonic Pi: https://sonic-pi.net/
ChucK: https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
Bored / Tired Playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7LBNxBsYaU3mPp7dtFsnss?si=fgb2xaQVS5yzesv_1ym59Q
Stressed Playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7mKxjx1zkzD4buIzjckoZQ?si=lCkPjCw6QO6LHyREYLvY2Q
Creativity Playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4wRfK7jIPVzpYkfzQE71Bd?si=aBjivDa6TZ6aeKNsNY1m4w
Editor's Notes
The Sounds of Software
Thank all of our sponsors!
Visit the booths
Who Am I?
Brett Berliner, Insight Digital Innovation (global consulting agency, closest offices are Nashville, Columbus, Cincy, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh)
I like Insight. Mostly focused on organizational transformation and cloud
Developer of over 14 years and easily distracted
Attendee of over 500 concerts
A pretty bad, but experienced guitar player
Why Are We here?
Stories of the past
Sony Boombox – this was my first CD player and an awesome birthday gift as a 11 year old. The laser broke within a year, the tape deck ate tapes but conveniently, there were two of them, allowing you to make backups, and it destroyed batteries.
RCA 5 disc changer – this was my first “surround sound system” as it had wired side and ambience speakers. It sounded terrible. Notable because my mom took it after I left for college, let it play and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers and NIN’s the Downward Spiral were in.
Audiovox Blue CD player – I had this drilled in to my center console on a shelf, power connected to the cigarette lighter, AUX cord connected through a tape converter. It skipped every time I hit a bump.
Diamond Rio MP3 player – this was my first MP3 player and it was 32 MB!! That’s not even a full album.
From Fatboy Slim video, “Praise You”. One of the most spun albums in my CD player and somehow over 20 years old
Important to reflect where we’ve come from because music is one of the largest technology jumps
A device smaller than all of those can now access nearly every major release
I wish I could get back the many thousands of dollars I spent on cassettes, tapes and mp3s (but I guess it was a contribution to the industry development)
You used to be able to say “I’m not really into music” and it was acceptable. Now it takes no effort to find it, it’s free, and can be taken with you.
Everywhere you go, people are on their headphones. And your car probably starts playing whatever you are listening to, without asking you.
D&D Alignment Chart of my favorite bands
This is the slide that took me the longest, because I don’t really know D&D rules like I thought I did..
Lawful Good: Pink Floyd Neutral Good: Talking Heads Chaotic Good: Wu-Tang Clan
Lawful Neutral: Kendrick Lamar
True Neutral: The National Chaotic Neutral: Radiohead
Lawful Evil: NIN Neutral Evil: Sonic Youth
Chaotic Evil: Iron Maiden
What are some Stereotype of software developers?
What about musicians?
Prefer to keep to themselves vs talking in groups
Can get tunnel vision and have difficulty when being distracted from their end goal. Interruptions are the worst.
Not creative, very matter of fact and analytical
Right brain exclusive
Even meaner – anti-social, negative and difficult
This is Frank Zappa, one of the weirdest dudes ever to play music.
Left brain
Eccentric, unpredictable and unwilling to adhere to process
Unreliable – show up when they want
Disinterested in technology or business
Arrogant (breaking up constantly because of egos)
Googled people who left music for software but that wasn’t that common
(If you’re important enough to be known in music you probably aren’t quitting to take a lot less money)
I did an experiment and looked around the open air room that I work in, seeing about 20 people
Insight is a ridiculously technical company, we have so much cloud enablement, IoT, DevOps, Machine learning and app modernization
Including myself, I saw:
Several amateur musicians
Several professional musicians
A artist who designs cartoons
Almost 10 people who present and blog
Two teachers who design their own curriculum
A game designer / developer
Moving past these stereotypes
For very smart musicians, you have:
Brian May, lead guitarist of Queen, who has a PHD in Astrophysics and has written several books
Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, who went to Harvard, left to record their amazing album Pinkerton, and went back to graduate eventually
Greg Graffin of Bad Religion, who founded the band at 15 and went to Cornell and has a masters in Geology and a PHD in Zoology
There’s an almost infinite amount of stories I could use, these are just three I liked.
Creative types are not often just “smart in their own way” or “street smart” as the clichés go.
This is a great quote and one that I think explains how I feel about the creativity of software professionals
There’s an overlap between the two and it should be celebrated
Creative people push themselves, the people around them and their entire industry
They grow through expectations and demands
We’re lucky to be able to work in a changing time where this can be embraced
You’re an artist too. Think about all of the things you do in your spare time that aren’t technical.
Think about anything you do that requires creativity, vision, repetition and patience
Painting / drawing / sculpting – a little obvious that these are artistic, but a lot of us do this either with our hands or technical tools
Graphical design – we may work in UX, or on front end development where we’re trying to make that true connection b/w visual design + technical
Gardening / yard work – my mom is an amazing gardener and comes up with some great stuff, but she would never call herself creative
Writing / presenting – if you blog or present and have to create slide decks, that’s incredibly artistic
Cooking – thinking outside the box,
Architecture & Engineering – these are all activities that require creativity.
Imost definitions of the word “creative”, they don’t include artistic.
While works of art are often pretty common coming from creative people, creative breakthroughs can come from anywhere.
Taking the next step and connecting the dots, all work in software is artistic and creative. It’s easy to see how design and UX is, for example, because it’s a more visual medium, but writing code, designing architecture and even writing scripts can be.
Thinking about beginning as a developer vs a guitar player
You’re handed an instrument that you can fiddle around with, and make some cool stuff.
Following tutorials vs. following sheet music
You don’t fully understand the power of what you can create
As you grow and learn how these objects, parts and pieces connect and work together to make a bigger picture, you end up creatively connecting the dots
One use case where all of the things come together is analytics dashboards
You get visual design where we want it to be striking, look good
Technical design where we need to store + retrieve these numbers, focusing on speed and reliability
And data design where we have to understand what’s important to people
Combining all of this is a term I like to use, “Technical Artistry”
It’s a great thing to be considered creative and a huge compliment
I embrace the metaphor and grow from it. When I’m asked what I do, I tell people I’m a creator and leader first, and a coder second.
Writing code is just an output for the ideas in my head.
-Train – Practice like a musician does.
Musicians get their skills from many different avenues all the time
The output seems like it’s generally creating songs, but in reality, there’s so much more work that they do with their craft
Jam sessions or studio sessions where they can both teach and learn at the same time
Learning how to play others’ songs to get better and inspired
Simply picking the guitar up and playing around with it on the couch
If your only output is what you write at work, you can be a great developer. Mastering your craft requires more
We participate in a lot of these, think about things like code camps where we donate, hackathons and more.
Great advice is to always constantly adjust your definition of successful
Think about the growth that bands take from day one to day one thousand. You start with “oh, this is a cool riff” and move on to “this is mixed perfectly, evokes an incredible amount of emotion and is pretty ground breaking”
I try to readjust my definition constantly
It started off with “don’t write any bugs”, then I learned SOLID and wanted to invoke
Now I understand at a higher level what it means to be great at my job. Things like understanding and building creative and expandable architectures, leading others to level up and more.
There’s an old joke among software developers that you should regularly be hating your work
I’ve heard different numbers – I don’t necessarily agree you should hate things you did
But in reality you should look back at projects and quickly think about things you would have done differently
It doesn’t mean you failed if you did the best with the knowledge you had at the time
There are so many stories of musicians hating their old work. For example, Radiohead with Creep / My Iron Lung / etc
For them, they didn’t think about creating something they had to use and think of every day
That could easily apply to you in software. Maybe you didn’t write enough integration tests and your points of connection are failing
Maybe you didn’t use DevOps correctly and builds are a pain
Dedicating yourself to the pursuit of knowledge
Musicians evolve and grow constantly
Some of my favorite bands have integrated technology and ideas
The National for example has gone from all live music, dark and grungy to integrating more technical recordings and session musicians
Learning small things and seeing how they can be integrated can teach us a lot
Proudly show off your work
Sometimes we think it’s a bad thing to be good at our jobs and successful, but hiding your abilities doesn’t help you grow
Modesty is a good quality but if everyone was modest and unwilling to share, we would have people making music only for themselves
We wouldn’t have conferences like this at all because nobody would want to lead
This doesn’t have to only be external. Show your boss what you did. Show your other teammates and ask them to share what they’re working on too
Harnessing music in your day to day work
Many studies about how music benefits the brain and increases creative process
There are some negatives to listening to music – not everyone likes it
Some people find it distracting and prefer silence, but I find once you get past that and embrace what it can do for you, benefits are clear
For years I preferred silence because of concentration’s sake, but I only started on headphones because of horrible elevator music versions of popular songs
There’s a ton of ways to consume music at work, and you may be limited by how you can do it. If you can, I recommend Spotify as the best service.
Free, although paid is worth it
Creating & sharing of playlists
Friends feed
Discover weekly
Cheap Hulu
Solid apps
Apple Music and Google Play are comparable too. If you can get a deal, or have a preference, they’re on the level.
Pandora is pretty wack. Really hard to get good playlists
Finding stuff on Youtube is cool. You get to see the videos or generally there will be lyrics videos so you can hear what’s being said.
If you get really cool and indie, Bandcamp!
Show of hands – how many use headphones every day? For how long?
Many people need them to block things out. Today’s modern workplace so often is an open setting where you need distractions. There’s nothing wrong or rude about wearing them at work, and in fact, should be a viable part of helping you get stuff done.
Old man’s recommendation – take care about hearing loss.
Don’t turn them up all the way, a little background noise is fine. Otherwise you’ll have a heart attack when someone approaches you
In ear actually can be better for hearing as long as you aren’t blasting at the top, because the distance of over the ear often leads you to turn them up too loud.
Don’t be rude with headphones
Respect others when they have them on, but also realize you can’t wear them all day and expect never to be interrupted
I used to get really upset when people would interrupt me. “Don’t they know I’m focused”
You have to think strategically and be good with the headphones on and off
Leading by example is always good, too – if others have headphones on, utilize e-mail / Slack
Don’t go too cheap. Besides driving you insane with the poor audio quality, you’ll have issues with things like tangled or frayed cables and bad connections.
Noise cancelling headphones sound like a great idea, but can often cause more problems than they’re worth.
A lot of time you’re using headphones due to an open office and needing quiet, but if you can’t hear anything you may miss important conversations
It can also prevent you from relaxing since you’re completely shut out. Some people this isn’t the case.
For specific headphones, the included The Apple headphones are OK, if you’re not an audiophile, but I find they don’t do a great job of blocking out external noise.
In ear, rechargeable recommendation: Anker Soundcore Liberty Neo
Over ear recommendation: Sennheiser HD280
Your average day as a music loving software professional
I know pie charts are pretty passe, but I just think it’s fun to kind of visualize your day. Obviously.. ymmv.
But if you look in the top left at solo coding – that is NOT a large part of your day. It is generally where you’re the most productive in terms of output.
So figuring out how to maximize that time, whether through headphones or ways to focus, is important.
Figuring out how to maximize your coffee intake is also important
The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career ..
Program a music list for 5 developers, a BA and a QA sitting in the same office. I sat closest to the speakers, so we plugged my computer in.
Somehow, we avoided major meltdowns.
Listening to music out loud over a speaker is a good compromise. Something is always on, and it keeps an ambience to
Share the responsibility
Be positive and don’t complain
Keep the volume steady
Keep it diverse
Make sure everyone is all in
Discovering something new is exciting
Listening to the same old things can get boring
Old music is comfortable
No time spent seeking it out
Can put you in a very specific, relaxed state of mind
They all have their moments, but I think albums are by far the best.
Studies have shown that we think best in about 45 minute sessions
A lot of albums are along that length
Playlists can be good, too. Have to be careful of length, you really don’t want them to be infinite
Random is tough. Radio features are cool, but you spend a lot of time skipping songs or figuring out what they are and it can break you from your thoughts
How to decide what to listen to?
I think matching music to your attitude, state of mind, and goals is something most don’t think of, but it’s incredibly important.
Think about the gym. You don’t listen to something sad and mellow at the gym, you don’t pick classical string music. Well, unless that pumps you up. Why is development any different?
Music has been proven to have effects on anxiety, depression and PTSD. IF it can affect situations as strong as these, why not simple work issues?
As cool as being a software developer is, we often work on boring things, or we have our day to day ups + downs that cause us to get tired.
There’s very specific music that really helps with this. Scientifically, music with higher beats per minute .
Your goal in listening to music when you’re tired should be to focus on things that wake you up, that help you get into the zone, that help you get pumped up. If you’re entering data or making CMS updates, it’s totally cool to listen to things that are a bit more intricate.
Think – metal (Metallica, Megadeth)
Upbeat rap music (Kanye, Chance the Rapper)
Pop music (I can’t give recommendations here, but can be radio, top 40 or electronic)
We all get stressed at work. Different things get us stressed and we handle the stress differently.
For me, it’s deadlines and parts of applications that don’t work well together.
It’s also solving deep bugs or knowing I have a lot of tedious things to do
I think familiar, chill music is the best thing for mood where you’re stressed out.
Pink Floyd is a great one, the familiarity of all these songs takes me back
Jazz and R&B can be, just maybe a little bit less aggressive
Mood – the best time we have is when we’re trying to be creative. This can be anything from writing code, designing architecture or refactoring in a cool way.
When we have the need to create, we want to get in our zone
I like very muted, catchy techno like Massive Attack or Portishead
Music involving a lot of technology like Radiohead
Anything you can do to not make the music the focus, but have it in the back of your head
The issue with Podcasts
I listen to a lot of good Podcasts.
My Favorite Murder
How Did This Get Made
Sports podcasts about my favorite teams
Conan O’Brien
It takes a long time to be able to do
I recommend only if very tedious or non time consuming work. You will get distracted
Actual musical technology
Garage band – pretty sweet
IOS and Mac OS versions
Some of the songs on DAMN.
Grimes – Visions
Justice - CROSS
ProTools and Fruity Loops
ProTools – great for mixing and drums. Kanye West, Dr. Dre, The Neptunes, Rick Rubin, Danger Mouse and Timbaland
Fruity Loops – not AS popular.
