I suggested last week that Claude Code needs elevator music…
Like, in the 3 minutes while you’re waiting for your coding agent to write your code, and meanwhile you’re gazing out the window and contemplating the mysteries of life, or your gas bill, maybe some gentle muzak could pass the time?
WELL.
Mike Davidson a.k.a. Mike Industries only went and built it.
Get Claude Muzak here (GitHub):
Elevator music for your Claude Code tasks! Automatically plays background music while Claude is working, because coding is better with a soundtrack.
Easy to install. Includes three pitch-perfect elevator music MP3s to get you started.
Wild. Wonderful.
Although:
Boris Smus adds a wrinkle: I do my Claude codes at least two at a time. Is there polyphonic elevator music?
YES PLEASE.
btw I’ve heard this a few times, Claude Code experts do indeed task up multiple claudes in parallel. Either working on different parts of the same app, or entirely different projects.
I would love to see what a custom UI to manage multiple claudes even looks like. Just, zero downtime, giving go-ahead permissions to one instance, pulling the throttle on another, instructing yet another…
I have a buddy who builds UI for traders at a global bank. The way he describes it, the traders are no longer doing individual stock trades. Instead they have a whole bunch of algorithms written by the quants running high-frequency trading on the market.
And the traders’ job is to sit there taking in the various signals and numbers, I imagine like Ozymandius bathing in the screens, just me and the world,
and instinctively steer the ship by ramping different HFT algorithms up and down.
The UI is to facilitate this fugue state crossed with a airplane pilot console situation.
One day driving our claude swarms will work like this.
So polyphonic Claude Codes?
Imagine that each claude instance plays just one track each and they come together…
I’m imagining Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Claudes.
Or to put it another way, something like video game music which is layered and looped and adaptive and I have discussed before (2020). In Red Dead Redemption,
the music reacts in real-time to the player’s actions … a more foreboding sound is required during moments of suspense. All of these loops have to segue into each other as events evolve on screen.
So the experience of playing RDR is that you’re galloping along at sunset in this beautiful American south-west landscape, and you notice the music quietly weave in an ominous new refrain… so you look out for what’s about to happen before it happens.
I want my polyphonic Claude Codes to intensify the minor key rhythms as the code tests fail and fail and fail again, before it is even escalated to me, drumbeats over the horizon, the distant rumble of thunder, approaching…
Also mentioned in that post:
Matthew Irvine Brown’s project Music for Shuffle (2011) which he composed for the wonderful belt-clip-mounted iPod Shuffle:
music specifically for shuffle mode – making use of randomness to make something more than the sum of its parts.
18 tracks sub 10 seconds each that can be played continuously in any order.
Like… Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, they must have arts programs, right? Are they commissioning for projects like this? Because they should.
I suggested last week that Claude Code needs elevator music…
Like, in the 3 minutes while you’re waiting for your coding agent to write your code, and meanwhile you’re gazing out the window and contemplating the mysteries of life, or your gas bill, maybe some gentle muzak could pass the time?
WELL.
Mike Davidson a.k.a. Mike Industries only went and built it.
Get Claude Muzak here (GitHub):
Easy to install. Includes three pitch-perfect elevator music MP3s to get you started.
Wild. Wonderful.
Although:
Boris Smus adds a wrinkle:
YES PLEASE.
btw I’ve heard this a few times, Claude Code experts do indeed task up multiple claudes in parallel. Either working on different parts of the same app, or entirely different projects.
I would love to see what a custom UI to manage multiple claudes even looks like. Just, zero downtime, giving go-ahead permissions to one instance, pulling the throttle on another, instructing yet another…
I have a buddy who builds UI for traders at a global bank. The way he describes it, the traders are no longer doing individual stock trades. Instead they have a whole bunch of algorithms written by the quants running high-frequency trading on the market.
And the traders’ job is to sit there taking in the various signals and numbers, I imagine like Ozymandius bathing in the screens, and instinctively steer the ship by ramping different HFT algorithms up and down.
The UI is to facilitate this fugue state crossed with a airplane pilot console situation.
One day driving our claude swarms will work like this.
So polyphonic Claude Codes?
Imagine that each claude instance plays just one track each and they come together…
I’m imagining Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Claudes.
Or to put it another way, something like video game music which is layered and looped and adaptive and I have discussed before (2020). In Red Dead Redemption,
So the experience of playing RDR is that you’re galloping along at sunset in this beautiful American south-west landscape, and you notice the music quietly weave in an ominous new refrain… so you look out for what’s about to happen before it happens.
I want my polyphonic Claude Codes to intensify the minor key rhythms as the code tests fail and fail and fail again, before it is even escalated to me, drumbeats over the horizon, the distant rumble of thunder, approaching…
Also mentioned in that post:
Matthew Irvine Brown’s project Music for Shuffle (2011) which he composed for the wonderful belt-clip-mounted iPod Shuffle:
18 tracks sub 10 seconds each that can be played continuously in any order.
Like… Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, they must have arts programs, right? Are they commissioning for projects like this? Because they should.