Why Lo-Fi Music Draws Listeners In | Hacker News Reader

Why Lo-Fi Music Draws Listeners In

discovermagazine.com

70 pointssusam61 comments

Relevant quote from Brian Eno (1996)

> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

this is very true, coming from a guy who collects thousand dollar modern drum machines/samplers designed to emulate 'crappier' ones from 2 decades ago..

This Eno quote is the best part of the post, and better than the article. :) As someone who makes some lo-fi electronic music, it really is an expression of limits, where you create and release tension against those limits, and this is what makes it evocative.

Two tracks in particular I created use that sense of old familiarity to draw out memories, using melodic tools from minimalism (Part/Glass), reproducing 1970s blade runner synth sounds, and samples that will only be familiar to a very 'leet few ("requiem for a hacker"), and another that uses sub-bass harmonics just at the edge of what headphones will take to get into the listeners chest register ("sleeping dogs"). Not linking my stuff directly because it feels a bit opportunistic (they're on soundcloud), but lo-fi music is not just technical production mistakes, it's intended to share a direct experience of the moment.

This applies perfectly to every HN discussion about "the old web". The gaudy artifacts of that time are now iconic landmarks of a more innocent era that we can never experience again.

- visitor counters

- "under construction" banners

- marquee scrolling text banners

- Sign my guestbook / View my guestbook

- "this site uses frames" / "best viewed on Netscape 4.0"

This article associates lo-fi music strongly with hip-hop, and kind of implies it's a fairly new phenomenon. But just look to the indie scene and you'll see it dates back to the 80s, with bands like Beat Happenings and Guided By Voices. And much before then, too, I'm sure, but I feel like these bands popularised it.

I'm a huge fan of instrumental hip hop, like J Dilla, DJ Shadow (Entroducing...), Madlib, DJ/Rupture etc. I've never listened to these new YT channels the article mentions, though. To be honest, I never really thought of these artists "lo-fi". The term I hear a lot is "crate digging". These guys scour music stores for old records to find songs and sounds they can repurpose in their own music, creating something completely fresh. Are they recording much new sounds though?

Kind related, but I love early thrash metal. Slayer, Dark Angel, Morbid Angel, etc. In particular, I love that really raw production quality. Don't ask me why, there's just something about a lot of newer thrash albums, where everything is so clean and crystal clear, I just don't connect with it as much. I guess the rawness lends it that aggression which is so integral to thrash.

> kind of implies it's a fairly new phenomenon

Does it? The "Beyond Youtube" section articulates the exact opposite.

Not just early thrash metal, I have a fondness of early hardcore punk like Minor Threat, early Raised Fist EPs etc

I think I find the raw energy just more credible than the hyper produced new stuff.

Also in that vein, oftentimes when I discover bands I slowly gravitate towards their older releases. Not always, but really most of the time

I mean IIRC the first distorted guitar sound was someone kicking in a speaker to make it sound shitty; low-fi and electric guitars are closely linked.

I can't speak to the first distorted guitar sound, but classic overdrive/distortion is just pushing the voltage of vacuum tube amplifiers out of the region where they amplify linearly ("over driving" them) to where the soft clipping introduces 2nd and 3rd and... nth order harmonics (harmonic "distortion") into the signal.

And that's why it's called distortion and overdrive.

It may be apocryphal but that story is generally credited to Venom, and accident rather than intention.

That story goes back much further than Venom. The version I've seen was from Ike Turner and his band, for the "Rocket 88" recording session in 1951 or so. From Deep Blues by Robert Palmer (page 222):

> "Everyone was excited and ready to record 'Rocket 88,' but there was a problem. Willie Kizart's guitar amp had been damaged when it fell off the top of the car and was emitting static and fuzz. 'When it fell,' Sam explains, 'that burst the speaker cone. We had no way of getting it fixed. I guess we probably could have hustled around some way, but it would have taken a couple of days, so we started playing around with the damn thing. I stuffed a little paper in there where the speaker cone was ruptured, and it sounded good. It sounded like a saxophone. And we decided to go ahead and record...'"

Seems pretty criminal to not mention Nujabes.

There's a whole myriad of genres and there are really a lot of them where distortion plays an important role in the sound. Thinking of it, probably every single track I played most involves use of distortion. I'm almost certain it has an explanation in psychoacoustics, it can't be a conincidence so many people like to go nuts on something which sounds off :) I can't pinpoint it exactly though, not sure if it has been researched.

I’m really bad at categorizing music. Where do you think Tangerine Dream fits?

Specifically, the Stratosfear and Phaedra albums. I’ve returned to those two albums for concentration music for about 25 years now.

> Kind related, but I love early thrash metal.

Metal birthed one of the greatest lo-fi genres: black metal. After hearing early Marduk, Mayhen, Emperor, Burzum, Darkthrone I was hooked. It was all done on shoe string budgets: Cheap second hand guitar, crappy amp, distortion pedal, drum machine, maybe toss in a keyboard. Then record the mess on an even crappier cassette recorder. The sound can be described as the guy drunkenly dropped his demo tape in the toilet, accidentally pissed on it, then tried salvaging it by dubbing the piss soaked tape to yet another piss soaked tape. The music is minimal with repetition being a theme and many bands were one or two guys recording in their bedrooms or someones basement. All complete crap and I absolutely love it along with all the weird sub genres and fusions it spawned. The synths in black metal even spawned its own genre: dungeon synth.

For the limited purposes of this article, "lo-fi" means "instrumental hip-hop playlists on YT" more or less. No doubt that plenty of other genres have experimented with the textures of cheap recording gear, whether that's Jandek[1] or King Tubby[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jandek

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Tubby

I mean, all recorded music was lo-fi before the invention of hi-fi (which is mostly a marketing term, but you can probably set it some time around the invention of full spectrum speakers, and electronic microphones and amplification)

If anyone else really enjoys finding new background music to study/work to. I would highly recommend checking out the South African deep house genre.

To try describe it to anyone who hasn't heard it before, basically its a house blend of minimal techno, melodic pads and soulful cord progression.

If anyone is interested, here's a list of some sets from YouTube & SoundCloud that I'd recommend listening to:

Pierre Johnson: Pure Ibiza Radio, Resident Mix [#002] (https://youtu.be/HZV_ridyGPg)

Kat La Kat: Deep Vibes #73 (https://soundcloud.com/kat-la-kat/deep-vibes-73)

DJ Buhle: LIVE at #KLK12 (https://youtu.be/5S_nqwf4_eI)

DJ Buhle: DJ Buhle LIVE at The 11th Annual Kat La Kat Party in Pretoria, SA #KLK11 (https://youtu.be/cYxWMYuY1DA)

2lani The Warrior: Super smooth house set in The Lab Johannesburg (https://youtu.be/Ht9x3ZDNXkg?t=54)

Ady flemming: Sultry Sounds Sessions #26 (https://youtu.be/MQ-F8uw0Lfc?t=74)

God Fathers of Deep House: DAY 1 OF 21 LOCKDOWN WITH MASIA THE GODFATHER (https://youtu.be/HQhkUOpOIWU)

Mzansi ! ;)

Thank you for the links - fantastic recommendations :-)

> "It's background music you can enjoy," Blackman says. Listeners can focus on what they're hearing, or they can let it fade.

This is pretty much why I listen to this while working.

I find that the "random noise generators" are too distracting or tiring.

It's not a genre of music I'd reach for in any other setting, but for work it does a great job of drowning out ambient distractions while also being enjoyable.

beats to <inset thing> to is a meme now. I expect the gateway Lo-Fi for many was "beats to relax/study to" on youtube.

Or for the brits: "lo fi boriswave beats to relax/get brexit done to" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cre0in5n-1E

For the Germans, Lo-Fi Merkelwave Beats to Relax/Study to. Timely, if you ask me.

https://youtu.be/reCMB81A70k

The vape clouds make it for me.

Wow, that is the actual conservative party's channel. I thought Will Smith[0] joining the meme was as sold out as this was going to get, and I was wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA56B4JyTgI

Impressive from Conservative Party HQ is all I can say.

> I find that the "random noise generators" are too distracting or tiring.

I've found sound of small rivers and birds chirping to be quite nice:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR4GNWcwAI8

Check out this website. It has a ton of different natural soundscapes (some only accessible to donors though; one time donation), all of which can be independently configured to your liking, and there's a button that makes the sliders randomly change over time too.

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainyRiverbankSoundscapeGe...

Thanks, but I found it simpler to simply use youtube-dl to download the audio component of a bunch of videos and and do an "mpg123 *" in a background window.

TFA: " Analyses show that between 1960 and 2010, the US Billboard Hot 100 songs with the most profound influences on pop music were hip hop."

The last several words link to:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.150081#d...

which says: "The rise of rap and related genres appears, then, to be the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts in the period that we studied."

This is an entirely different claim from the one in the TFA, even assuming that the RSP paper is taken at face value, which is hard to do given its own list of limitations.

I don’t remember if the paper lists it among its limitations but it’s worth noting there is a pretty sharp continuity in Billboard’s methodology around 1991 (they didn’t really include any rap before that) that will warp this kind of analysis if you don’t control for it. This is sort of known among musicologists of pop music and often glossed over by this kind of research

Did you mean 'discontinuity'? Sharp and continuous are somewhat contradictory.

I have been making algorithmic music recently; it works surprisingly well in that you can listen to it for a long time without experiencing any feeling of repetition.

But platforms have limits on the length of a piece (I think for Spotify it's around 7 minutes?) which makes it difficult to distribute while emphasizing its specific strengths.

I hadn't thought about streaming, and especially YT streaming! Will look into it.

If anyone has pointers to get started with streaming, that would be great.

(Is it possible to stream from a simple device like a Pi that would be always on and be dedicated to the task? -- Edit: yes, it is; just found a tutorial.)

If Spotify does have a length limit on songs, it's much higher than 7 minutes. Just looking through my recently played collection, I found a 14 minute track from the Mirror's Edge OST - https://open.spotify.com/track/5E3q9mLEXXaLNPc1AWf4lu?si=c2e...

Streaming to YouTube is also great for long-running projects, as they don't appear to have an upper limit on stream length (for example, NASA TV has been streaming since 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21X5lGlDOfg) although I think YouTube won't save the stream if it's longer than 24 hours.

Yeah given Sleep's Dopesmoker is on spotify and clocks in over 58 minutes I'm not sure where this 7 minute limit comes from.

If you search for "white noise 3 hour long" you will find a track from an artist named "White Noise Therapy" and it is, unsurprisingly, just over 180 minutes.

It's also been streamed 30 million times which is impressive.

Well maybe it depends on who you are? Or maybe on what you use to get to Spotify (I use DistroKid). Not sure.

The last bit (about people listening to hip hop because they "respond to the beat" vs the talent & popularity of 50 Cent) is intriguing and I wish they'd explored more.

it's not that deep. j. dilla is a hip hop producer, i expect him to say that much.

i personally think that we owe lo-fi to the anime community. they popularized it with nujabes of samurai champloo and the like. but since the root is in hip hop, the hip hop community as a whole will claim ownership ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To everyone that grew tired of "Lofi Beats to Study/Relax to", I present you Mr. Dom Whiting with his exquisite techno and drum and bass mixes that he plays while cycling on the streets. Great music to work/code to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_weZX8rEoio

I can't believe he didn't get hit by a car or flip over a curb. That dude is way more coordinated / better at multitasking than I am.

I used to listen to "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" a lot because it was just very... inoffensive I guess? Like, I could listen to it for hours and hours passively without being annoyed in any way by it. It didn't have any particular thing I liked either, but it didn't need to.

I honestly used to get quite annoyed at repetitions, especially if they had annoying vocal samples

I started doing lo-fi music (folk) for practical reasons when I was a teenager. I didn't have any other device to record than a cheap webcam. I started loving the sound and didn't bother to update my equipment for many years.

I've heard Lo-Fi Hip-Hop described as "easy listening for Millennials", and IMO, they're not wrong.

I got into it through ChilledCow which is now Lofi Girl, but I think it has roots back into Trip Hop and Acid Jazz. I also hear some lounge music influence along the lines of Cafe Del Mar and the Buddha Bar series. Good to focus, good to relax.

Lo-Fi dates back to the mid-70's when Punk music hit the scene. They were reacting to what they perceived to be over-engineered prog music such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Nowadays it's a reaction to DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations, e.g. ProTools, GarageBand, etc.) and playing perfectly "on the grid." There's an emphasis on going back and recording "live" (everyone playing together rather than tracking separately), letting the tempo vary naturally, and not trying to make everything perfect. The upshot? People like it better.

I reach for lo-fi when I'd like to set the mood chill and relax. Typically, for evening spent with my girlfriend or for a bunch on a weekday.

For work, I prefer more dynamic instrumental music. Specifically, hypnotic, minimalistic, psychedelic techno. An artist I really like these days is Luigi Tozzi[0] and the label Hypnus Record.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/hypnus-memoirs/1-luigi-tozzi

I started listening to Lo-Fi maybe six months ago. I don’t recall how exactly I uncovered the genre, but it was on YouTube, and likely a result of me searching for soothing relaxing music. The visual aesthetics of lo fi really drew me in. Surprised it is popular to HN too!

YouTube has really taken off for Music, a lot of share our joy of particular music within the comments section, and now people live chat in channels that continuously run music “live”. Lo Fi channels do this a lot.

All that said, I got bored of Lo Fi pretty quickly. For those interested, melodic house (downtempo trance) is really good these days, for example the below were some of my favourite sets recently

https://youtu.be/v2dSpsuBJGI

https://youtu.be/eSsgODhHBI0

I get bored of trance wayy faster than lofi. Maybe you just need to check out a different lofi genre? There are huge variations

Also deep house, Anjunadeep radio show is well worth a listen. It’s a shame the content because repedative, which I attribute mostly to the relatively small group of producers in the genre

Anjunadeep is a fantastic recommendation. I regularly listen to their playlists both during work and outside of it now. Very versatile

If you like Anjunadeep then I’d recommend looking into the weekly Above and Beyond Group Therapy (abgt) mixes, and also possibly Monstercat Silk Showcase, another weekly music music

These are great. Other good weekly deep house radio shows that I code to: Nora En Pure Purified Radio, https://soundcloud.com/noraenpure/tracks The Boom Room Selected, https://soundcloud.com/theboomroomofficial Oliver Heldens Heldeep Radio, https://soundcloud.com/heldeepradio

Thanks, always on the lookout for new stuff! I didn’t mind hardwell off the record sets, but the show has ended now.

I do listen to abgt, Tony from the group also has some good deep house sets on YouTube

I highly recommend Cercle channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h96MGcsi7GQ Great view, nice music.

Maybe a little deeper but VSNZ has the same kind of idea. I went nuts for weeks on this Adriatique set: https://youtu.be/mIv_HcNun-w

Can't recommend Cercle enough.

My favorite Cercle video is the one at the pyramid's of Giza.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6GDiyHmbE

YouTube really is great for music. They have a lot of stuff and live stuff. (including Praxis a band rediscovered:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=agPnQb9CntY&feature=share

I can’t listen to the same things day after day. So a mix of classical /rock / punk / synthwave (80s sounding instrumentals).

I still listen to colega radio, which provides is a mix of structured shows by former students and random stuff.(each show is archived)

https://wmbr.org Some of my regulars: “breakfast of champions, late risers club, jd deathcar experience, lost and found, paradox box, radio ninja, nonstop ecstatic screaming)

I used to listen to a lot of lofi hip hop but nowadays I've switched more to some Techno mixes from people local in Hamburg

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