I prefer music that you can "catch a ride on" because they have a lot of forward harmonic motion: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven come to mind. For Bach go n

I prefer music that you can "catch a ride on" because they have a lot of forward harmonic motion: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven come to mind. For Bach go no further than Glenn Gould's performances. Other than that it's occasionally nice to put on some 60's and 70's rock, the grungy kind of stuff (from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin to Metallica) that the forefathers of programming languages and personal computing listened to while they worked. There's got to be a relationship (either aesthetically or culturally) between the workflow that they created for us and the music they used to keep them going.