As a massive house-head and someone who's been involved in the electronic music scene to varying degrees for two decades, I actually find it extremely difficult to listen to music while writing code, because all I actually do is listen to the music, rather than work.
Hah, I feel like I'm kinda in the same boat. As a result, I've got a playlist full of "broken in" songs that I've heard 25+ times and sound boring to me. I still find it a little distracting with songs that have vocal tracks, but for the most part it has brought Squarepusher and Venetian Snares back to my active rotation, which makes me a happy camper (coder?)
Lol, it's nice to find like-minded people out there. While my initial post commented on electronic music in particular, I feel the need to re-iterate my point with respect to other genres. I'm a huge fan of Romantic-era piano (Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Säens, etc.), and would find it impossible to do basically anything other than listen should I hear these pieces.
I would say the opposite, most "good" house music, or house that is considered tasteful, doesn't have lyrics. It may have some voice samples, but nothing too distracting. There are obviously many exceptions to this rule, but you can generally consider most house music to be instrumental.
I've been a house head since the 90s, and I would definitely not describe most house music as instrumental. Classic house frequently had vocals, in both the Chicago and especially NYC/NJ (garage house) styles. Most subsequent subgenres of house followed suit, whether using vocal samples or singing.
Instrumentals are a bit more common in melodic house, progressive house, etc but even then there's still a lot of non-instrumental tracks.
I completely agree with the sibling comment that instrumentals are far more common in techno.
> most "good" house music, or house that is considered tasteful, doesn't have lyrics.
I agree.
> but you can generally consider most house music to be instrumental.
If an instrumental is music without words at all (not even in voice samples), as far as I've experienced, Techno instrumentals are far more common; House instrumentals have always seemed somewhat rare.
As such, when I feel the need to put my headphones on to drown out external noise, I prefer listening to musique d'ameublement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furniture_music)