What music do y'all listen to when working on assignment sheets/coursework/crackpot theories etc.? Or do you even listen to any at all? From my experience, music with lots of vocals is pretty distracting, as its like someone jabbering in your ear nonstop. But some types, like chillout trance and electronica, pretty much act as crazy-hot enzymes

Currently listening to: Lemon Jelly - '64 - '95
Currently studying: Metric Spaces Assignment 2

NP: Foo Fighters - In Your Honour CD2 (Acoustic side)
NW (Now workingon): Marking 1st year Analysis II

Most of the time I just play whatever I feel like listening to, Biffy Clyro, Flaming Lips, Foo Fighters, Lemon Jelly, Coheed and Cambria, Joe Satriani, ostal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, ...

Jamie

At the drive in: in casino out. And I'm marking (or procrastinating- you choose)- It tends to make me a little excitable...

...Just drew a picture of "Dennis- the continuity monster" on some of my supervisees work- I'm not sure if they'll be pleased...

Electronica/Bach is way better- my faves atm are Bach:The Well Tempered Clavier (it fills my head, without making me draw Dennis) and the recently rediscovered and intensely awesome Fourtet: Rounds.

Ahh Fourtet, are they still on the iPod... yes! It is still great isn't it?

I've been less musically inclined when working recently (the fiancé can't work with music on) but some LJ is a fav.

(this isn't a post just to increase my post count, honest)

Hmm, my listening habits don't change that much whether I'm working or not. I just listen to what I feel like listening to at that moment. During my recent all nighter that was mainly Pink Floyd (including solo Gilmour and Waters stuff) and lots of jazz (mainly Tony Williams, Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and some other random stuff).

I listen to nothing generally, or whatever random comes up on itunes. Because I'm a boring sod.

I usually listen to Pink Floyd, The Beatles, or most often guitar music by Joe Satriani

Currently listening to: Joe Satriani - "Up in the sky"
Currently trawling the internet for something to talk about for 10-20 mins in my tutorial tomorrow.

(Any suggestions?)

I have a 200 song playlist I just let bump round on "random", it's mostly the small section on ska & blues i have on my mp3 and the songs that I bought entire albums just for (the rest of the album is usually terrible): Plug in baby, all my life, everything is average nowdays, star 69, breaking the habit, wake up, ace of spades, just a day, still waiting, grabbag the list goes on. I wish i had more music, damn laptop.

Currently listening to: Spybreak - the proppellerheads (makes anything your doing seem cool and action packed)
Currently trying to do the metric spaces questions before the marked test

Same as Alex, got a 900-ish track playlist that is usually on random, but some times I just focus on some artist...

Well you lot were totally useless, I've decided to do the proof that there is a prime between every n and 2n. It's a bit long but 100% spiffy; it's one of the most refined proofs I've ever read.

I've got a good proof of that in my excursions essay actually, which one are you doing? The one which uses is just awesome.

More to the point of the thread, I've got a 21482 track playlist but I almost never listen to it all on shuffle (though sometimes it's fun to do that just for the hell of it :D). It's way better to listen to an album from start to finish rather than just isolated tracks imo, so that you can actually get in the mood of the music instead of just switching every 5 minutes.

You're damn right about albums. Albums>>single tracks. On the topic of the proof, yes it does contain that particular binomial coefficient. It also contains the theta function and a lot of other stuff, it's a bit obfuscated but nice an compact.

Ah, then it's probably not the one I was refering to. Mine's by Erdős and about 2 pages long but brilliantly simple (it's in Proofs From the Book).

The result follows from simple ind... You know what, it's too late and I can't be bothered

Induction only works on finite sets. You should know that...

Briefly back to albums there are albums where you should listen to the whole thing to get a feel, but then again there are albums that are just full of filler (crap) and then one golden track that was released as a single and you bought the album for. When you don't really want to concentrate on you music it's nice to just hop about all your favourite things.

meh. All of my favorite tracks are in albums that are great from start to finish and I always want to concentrate on the music. :p

Yes, it is in fact Erdos' proof. Does the proof you have rely on any previous knowledge beyond A-level mathematics?

Not really, no. That said my version of the Erdos proof doesn't have the theta function and I've seen one version with the theta function in it. It was slightly less cool. :P

Well it certainly claims to be based on Erdos' proof. It's taken from a textbook so that's probably a bad sign :p

Yeah, I've read that one in a textbook as well but I forgot which one. I've got too many number theory textbooks...

I thought you were only supposed to really need one textbook to cover all of the basic subject matter. Still proofs from the book looks pretty damn cool; I looked it up on Amazon and it had the first 2 (widely spaced) pages of the proof. I have to admit it looks far better than the proof I found.

Yeah but I didn't buy these for uni, I've had pretty much all of them since school. :p They're still fairly different but have some overlap since a good part of them are slanted towards the analytic side of number theory. Get Proofs From the Book though, it's my favorite maths book by far, it has the most awesome proofs you'll ever see.

What music would you listen to while reading it? :p

Cue horrific puns; anyone? My knowledge of music is too puny :( Also, it's a month till my birthday, I may well ask for that book.

Why, the music of primes of course.

Oh yeah, that was awesome :p

Indeed, it had 4000 rpm servo-motors and 350 psi pressure gauges.

Thank you,
The Cosmin Robotics Team.

lmfao
Genius. Just caught me off guard.

All right then, back on topic now.
Best long song ever = Genesis - Supper's Ready
Great for long proofs :p

MUTE MATH

Best long song = Baba O'Riley - Who

Tho i'm not really a fan of the long songs, they tend to lose somthing and you start to think it would have been better if they'd have made it shorter.

It's cheating but also: Jesus Of Suburbia - Green day

Call Baba O'Riley a long song ? It's really not :D

Well, 5 mins has gotta count as long for someone who listens to punk (I've yet to see a 3+ min punk song, or a clean or complex one for that matter! :P)... Won't Get Fooled Again is actually an even better song than Baba O'Riley and is 3 mins longer. I consider 5 minutes to be fairly standard and long starts around 10. Looking at my Winamp media library right now, a bit less than half of the songs are longer than Baba O'Riley.

I'm not even going to bother arguing the fact that long songs are way better than short ones. Besides, some short songs tend to lose somthing and you start to think it would have been better if they had not made them at all.

Echoes FTW.

Echoes is still a bit short IMO :p
(But great nonetheless)

Well, I've got tons of longer songs than Echoes on my PC (up to a 95 min one), I was simply commenting on the fact that it's an awesome song.

What's that 95 minute song (if it's not just a live) ? :D

In fact, I've just listened to it and it's only 10 minutes long. It's called "Penis Dimension" by (unsurprisingly) Frank Zappa and, due to some bug or something, the file shows up as being 95:09 minutes long. That makes the longest track on my PC award go to "Surgical Sound Specimens From The Museum of Skin" by Fantômas (74:14) which is actually a single track (the only one on the album, Delerium Cordia) and pretty cool/disturbing. That's followed by some live stuff (entire sets as one file I think, so they don't count) and then "i" by Cult of Luna (50:00), "Gondwana" by Miles Davis (46:50), "Mountain Jam" by the Allman Brothers (44:00) and "Ascension" by Coltrane (41:25) (all of these are long live jams). Supper's Ready is only in 89th place (though there's a live version which is 61th), while Echoes is 78th (the standard album version, there's a longer live one at 69th place). Baba O'Riley is an impressive 7295th place. :D

This was the long but useless post of the month, brought to you by Deloitte.

How did you actually get those rankings ? (Hoping you didn't count all the way down to 7295 :p)
Nice selection of tracks by the way.

No, I ordered the media library by track length and put it in a playlist (playlists are automatically numbered so then I just searched through to get to the tracks).

Okay.
It's just that my Winamp locks up when I do that.
Anyway, so I get that Baba O'Riley (longest version I have, 5:50) is number 5222. You must have an impressive number of tracks in total, as I do already have quite a lot.
Then again I don't listen to as much "progressive" music.

Long song quota : Atom Heart Mother, awesome.

I've got 21482 tracks in all according to Winamp (158.86 GB), 73 days and 19 hours in all (the RIAA hates me). The long tracks actually span quite a lot of genres but most of them are jazz and then rock which could very broadly be termed as "progressive".

Interesting to see that you have much more long songs that I have, even though I have more songs total :
38650 tracks in playlist, average track length: 4:13
And you have about 4:56 average from what you said.

P.S.: Every time I scroll down this topic I end up laughing at the poor Team Robotics guy :D

I've decided at length that any good music just distracts me way to much if I'm trying to work. John Coltrane is currently destroying the Mayer-Vietoris sequence for compact cohomology for me by making me play air double-bass, any hip hop sets me bouncing like an MDMA fuelled kangaroo on a space hopper, prog sends me into a trance, electro similar, classical sets me thinking and punk is just plain too abrasive.

Nope. Ear curdling beige pop-rock ftw.

I'm off to download some coldplay or something.... :(

Scratch that, just rediscovered a stormer of an album. The Argument by Fugazi- Actually amazing! Ear-blistering guitar work in tapetry of extraordinary jazz tempered beats, gentle vocals breed disquiet in untied soliloquy. Rage of a people, even handed hand in hand distopia.

Buy this album.

oh and British Sea Power's The Decline

buy that too.

edit: Just bought their new album "Do you like rock music?" that one's amazing also (could take or leave "open season"). Think Editors but with testicles and a much better sense of songcraft. I know noone will read this: but it needs saying dammit!

This thread is now more or less devolving into me ranting about stuff I like, but what the hell...

They inspired Tool, Godspeed and pretty much all things art rock, they were hailed as the loudest band on earth in their day and they pretty much rule.

Think Tool and Godspeed taking over billy corgan's (albeit pretty lame) side project Zwan, then making it very dark indeed. The eighties production leaves much to be desired and the rawness sometimes emulsifies otherwise stunning songmanship and cool drum lines are often lost to bad tuning. But nothing can change the degree to which this band changed things.

Their CDs have been discontinued but I just got a copy of The Great Annihilator from my cousin- I'm still getting my head round it....

But prog/art/post/grunge-rock kids: expect a copy pushed aggressively in your direction very soon...