The Software Engineer to Metalhead Pipeline · bradleycarey.com

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

This is not a theory based on three carefully selected playlists. Last.fm has tracked 155,913 songs across 10,717 artists for me since 2007. My all-time top seven are Deafheaven, Panopticon, Russian Circles, Buckethead, Whirr, Four Tet, and Aphex Twin. Extreme metal, post rock, shoegaze, and electronic music all made it through the optimization process.

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

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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

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I treated this whole thing as a joke for years, but the...