lo-fi study beats

This genre is not worth getting fuzzy about. Not worth getting excited about either. You could do worse for background music.

no wait let’s analyze the fuck out of it!

I also think there's something about the fact that most huge trap anthems these days are still like one hazy sample or a single soft synth sound + huge distorted 808s. It feels like both strains have some dna from early '10s underground producers.

i can’t bring myself to be cynical about this trend, i kinda just love that kids are into ambient

I think I also like that "music to study to" is an actual popular genre. Based on the first few tracks on a Youtube channel of this that I just tuned into, I kind of like this stuff for what it is and would listen to it before a lot of other popular things. It's calming and pleasant. Both parts of "smooth jazz for millennials" seem wrong to me tbh.

All I actually needed at this moment was something to calm my nerves and I'm almost embarrassed by how well this worked for that. I might pass out if I leave it on for too long, though. This is the channel btw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NOSDKb0HlU

Moving on now

My 10-year-old loves to listen to Spotify playlists of this while doing homework. What I don't get is, who makes it? When I try to google the bands and tracks I basically just get links to other playlists, never an actual homepage for the band or music-press writeups or.... Who is Aaarly? Who is Obie Hans? Is there just some big factory where one person makes a bunch of these beats and then assigns artist and track names at random?

I just Googled the artist they were playing on that channel just now (Leavv - "Flushing the Stairs"). Guy has a full-length album and uses male pronouns and identifies as a producer at least: https://chillhop.bandcamp.com/album/tales-of-a-flowing-forest

He also has an Instagram page and a dog: https://www.instagram.com/leavv_/

Afaik ChilledCow is the most popular channel, it’s its own label at this point. They’re not anonymous from what I can tell looking at their spotify playlists (eg: https://open.spotify.com/user/chilledcow/playlist/0vvXsWCC9xrXsKd4FyS8kM ) however most of them have what looks like japanese names and are actually not japanese ( or at least the 3 artists from the list I checked - Ky Akasha, Yasumu and Kupla all looked non-Asian).

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the songs are made by a computer that is just fed loops and beats. Wasn’t there already some AI developed that could make unlimited music from stems? I remember a site with Jai Paul’s Jasmine that did this.

i can't imagine studying to this stuff personally

i feel like chill-out/ambient music reaches for innovation and/or meaning in a way this stuff doesn’t - it’s designed to be filler, designed to be unmemorable even

Found it. It’s called BRONZE AI ENGINE:

https://jaipaul.bronze.ai/

Theoretically you could feed this AI stems from a couple
songs of “lo-fi beats” and it could do variations of it for unlimited time.

I had a friend who did a PhD in electronic composition. For one of his comprehensive exams, he had to, on the spot, in a limited time, write code that could generate a pastiche of an early 20th century composer's (e.g. Bartok's) style. I imagine generating lo-fi study beats would be v doable.

That channel Sund4r posted has a “live chat” going; never seen that on YT before.

10:19PM carrotjuice123 “it’s time to chill”

"It seems like in the late 90s / 2000s, this kind of music had to work in both a club and a hotel lobby (e.g., Mushroom Jazz), and started to horn in on Muzak and Smooth Jazz as default background music. Now that public spaces are mostly closed, it makes sense that they're turning into 100% study beats."

this new stuff wouldnt work in the old context. and those old vadim/jazz fudge etc beats would sound too 'hard' too. these study beats are very unobtrusive. they also seem perfectly 'small' in an audio dimension sense in a way that is good for laptop/tiny speakers.

did these kinds of beats exist before chilledcow's playlist? or did people start making beats for the playlist? as playlists go, this one is remarkably stylistically uniform -- a consistent vibe, no matter which track is playing.

i also have to say that, when i started this thread, i had only listened briefly to lo-fi study beats. but i listened a lot yesterday and now i'm a fan.

treesh scroll up - Jordan has outline the archaeology

that said i don’t know if we’ve cracked exactly how/why ChilledCow and its ilk became so big? it was happening pre-COVID

I first heard about this from this Bojack Horseman episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10yjDUufcVo

When I saw other people talking about lofi hip-hop beats to relax/study to, figured that they were making excellent Bojack references. And for a couple days, after I found the actual channel, was pretty impressed that someone had devoted their time to bring this one-line joke from a grown-ups cartoon to life.

this new stuff wouldnt work in the old context. and those old vadim/jazz fudge etc beats would sound too 'hard' too. these study beats are very unobtrusive. they also seem perfectly 'small' in an audio dimension sense in a way that is good for laptop/tiny speakers.

― candyman, Wednesday, February 3, 2021 5:32 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was listening to the channel one day and started thinking about all the instrumental hip-hop I used to listen to back in the 90s, like "Oh yeah, these beats kinda remind me of DJ Krush!" One of his albums was my go-to calming background music back then. But then I listened to it for the first time in 20 years, and while some of it might have worked, other songs were definitely too intense for lofi hip hop radio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eRwsiYeuQM

they do work for working and studying and especially grading

Yeah that's the annoying thing. This stuff isn't without merit but it shouldn't be mixed up with more complex sorts of music. But whatever, I'm embarrassed here to be that concerned about genre labels.

Hadn't realized that ChilledCow is a label. I remember when they had to change their art loop from what they took from Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart... early 2018

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-Fi_Girl

xp

on the chilledcow wiki, the genre is down as lo-fi hiphop, click that and you get ...

Chillhop
"Lo-fi hip hop" redirects here. For the genre of jazz-influenced hip-hop, see Jazz rap. For the genres of hip-hop characterized by low sound quality, see Mumble rap, Memphis rap, and Cloud rap.

lol

"That channel Sund4r posted has a “live chat” going; never seen that on YT before."

Live chats are definitely part of YouTube livestreaming channels. I've seen it before with concerts or e.g. last year's virtual Canada Day.

Not to mention people playing Minecraft.

Is there just some big factory where one person makes a bunch of these beats and then assigns artist and track names at random?

ive seen articles over the years speculating about spotify filling out their first-party playlists for things like "chill jazz"/"peaceful piano"/whatever by paying people a flat fee to create original tracks that are then credited to fake artists, with spotify owning the master rights. i guess its the 21stC equivalent of library music, in 30 years i wonder if there will be Numero-style comps of such stuff

One Eye Open OTM about this being like contemporary library music. It also kinda reminds me of Weather Channel music, though that stuff tends to be more like smooth fusion

Remember Weather Channel music guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnkjvKv5R84

AOTY in The Wire iirc

Adult Swim is probably an important link too, when they started commissioning Flying Lotus to do bumpers between animation, and the current college studiers were kids.

I read a couple high school essay-level Medium articles on the origins of lo-fi hip-hop, mostly pretty bad (defining "low fidelity" and mentioning Dilla then jumping right to the current crop of channels and producers). But there were some illuminating bits, about Youtube introducing that 24/7 mode, those big channels and the anime girl, Nujabes being the Dilla of the genre (aside from Dilla being the Dilla of the genre), and some other specific producers getting name-checked.

Minecraft soundtrack music is exactly like this, yes.

tempted to start making this music just so I can add in a few tracks with subtly disturbing melodic shifts and ruin everyone's studies

im tempted to start making this music so i can have a successful youtube channel with little effort

Too late in the game to enter know I think. There’s thousands of clones and I’ve only seen less than 10 channels that are successful with it and they’ve been at it for years now.

Now not know stupid autocorrect

In addition to the precursors already mentioned, I think these 2 artists deserve mentioning:
Wagon Christ, "Throbbing Pouch" album specifically (1995)
Fat Jon, "Wave Motion" album specifically (2002)
Like this would fit right in on one of these Playlists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYKrp_VE0lY

a former ilxor makes ambient techno playlists that work better for this purpose i think.

do tell?

it's not a controversial one, at all. an estimable and interesting person. but i don't think they hang around here or want to be namechecked.

two of the artists i've learned of through this playlist, and liked, are special request and bella boo.

therefore you might go as far as to link? please?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JhdzQsWXG8Ku6hdROqbc6?si=0be241835bce4a60

my word

thanks

Corey <3

chilledcow changed their youtube username to Lofi Girl. smart branding move i think.

also i saw this recently lol https://hard-drive.net/lofi-hip-hop-radio-girl-still-fails-test-after-four-years-of-studying/

'Probably somewhere in Italy' – nah, I'm pretty sure that's Lyon in the background.

My (second grade) kid asked recently - "Is it OK if I use YouTube while I do homework, to play quiet music that's made for studying?"

That's so adorable.

morris, did you break out in tears of joy at that moment?

because i did, just reading your post.