Hey, remember how I said I'd post again in the last one of these? Well I'm only about a year late, and it might've taken this quarantine to get me to do this again. For this first post back, I'm gonna post my final paper for my world music class this semester. It's about lofi music, both lofi indie and lofi hip hop, which is something very close to my heart and most of my creative visions. Hopefully I'll remember to write another one of these for next week! Enjoy my essay:
Timbre and Nostalgia, or Why is Lo-Fi Music?
Introduction:
If you have been on Youtube much over the last few years, you might have been recommended a video titled “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to”. If you have clicked on it, you know that it is not a normal Youtube video, but a live stream, where the video portion is just a short looping animation of a girl studying. This is not the important part. As the title implies, it functions as a radio station for relaxing instrumental hip hop beats. This stream has been running (nearly) continuously for over three years and has become somewhat of an internet sensation. In fact, there are many videos blowing up all over the internet just like this. Some aren’t streams, instead being something closer to a mixtape. Some switch the girl out for Bernie Sanders filibusters. Regardless, one thing is clear: this music is resonating with many people. But that term in the title - “lofi”? What does that mean? Why has this kind of music seemingly exploded on the internet over the last few years? And, most importantly, how does this music affect us?
Section 1: What is Lo-Fi music?
To start exploring Lo-Fi music, we should start at the term. According to Adam Harper, “During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, 'lo-fi,' a term suggesting poor sound quality, the opposite of 'hi-fi,' became a characteristic perceived in certain popular-music recordings,” (Harper 2014). Like Harper says, the term literally means poor sound quality, the opposite of a professional, slick, Hi-Fi system. The music Harper is talking about here is not the same music I mentioned above, however. Lo-Fi music began in the 1970s and 80s, and mostly referred to home recordings, done either by professional musicians like The Beach Boys or Paul McCartney, or amateur musicians, spurred on by the proliferation of multitrack home cassette recorders. These recordings often featured small mistakes in the tracking, very unprofessional mixing, and very poor sound quality due to being recorded on cassette tapes. These amateur independent musicians continued recording on cassette through the end of the 1990s, as it was much cheaper and more accessible than renting out a professional studio. Thus this style of recording became closely tied to independent, or “indie” rock.
Despite this tying of the terms Lo-Fi and Indie Rock, other groups of musicians also created music around this time that featured less than perfect sound quality. One place where it was especially prevalent was in early hip hop. Hip hop has almost always made extensive use of samplers, and in many ways evolved alongside them. Early samplers, however, often recorded audio at low bitrates and with low bit depth. This would introduce distortion and background noise to anything done using them, so if you listen to these early hip hop recordings, you hear many of the same things that make Lo-Fi indie rock, well, Lo-Fi. Namely, the mixing is non-traditional, the instruments are distorted, the recordings have a homemade quality to them, and there’s a certain rawness, a grit to the proceedings. Despite this, the term Lo-Fi didn’t enter the hip hop lexicon until as recently as ten years ago.
Interestingly, even as technology has improved, with high-quality digital recorders replacing cassette machines, and high-quality samplers coming out with near-perfect reproduction of the source material, there are still recordings coming out today chasing the same qualities these old Lo-Fi recordings have, whether by using the actual vintage machines themselves or by using software recreations of them.
Section 2: Timbre
Now that we’ve spoken a bit about what Lo-Fi music is historically, we are going to expand on the qualities these recordings have. As I previously stated, these recordings are distorted and have poor sound quality, but how does that affect the music? Well, these features all affect one part of the music primarily: the timbre. Timbre is, “the acoustic property that distinguishes two sounds of identical pitch, duration, and intensity and is integral to the identification of all kinds of auditory objects, including musical instruments, voices, and environmental sounds,” (Hailstone, Omar, Henley, Frost, Kenward, and Warren, 2006). Essentially, it describes the actual sound of an instrument, rather than just the notes it plays. This idea can be expanded to recordings as well, as two different recordings of the same song, played in the same arrangement, can sound wildly different based on the way it was recorded each time. As described by Robert Fink, timbre is a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks, and timbre, the “real” physical and perceptual correlates of that object.” (Fink, Latour, and Wallmark 2018). In other words, it isn’t as simple as the sound of an instrument or recording, it also includes the way that sound interacts with us and our culture. In the 2006 study, it was shown experimentally that certain timbres can predictably and consistently evoke certain emotion, “For example, a “dull” spectral quality is associated with sadness in music, whereas the “brash” quality conferred by prominent high frequencies is associated with anger” (Hailstone, Omar, Henley, Frost, Kenward, and Warren, 2006).
Now, the timbres associated with Lo-Fi often include a loss of very low and high-frequency material, as cassettes cannot reproduce more than a limited range of frequencies, an audible hiss or crackle, usually from a cassette or vinyl record respectively, and a somewhat veiled and distorted quality to anything recorded with a microphone, often the result of recording in an undesirable space and singing a little bit too loudly into the microphone. These result in a sound that is a little dull due to the lack of high-frequency information, which could impart a certain sadness according to the quote above. All of these are signifiers of low budget recording, which may explain why, according to Harper, Lo-Fi music’s “raw, simple, underproduced quality... suggests closeness to the wellspring of musical creativity”. This authenticity has been a large factor in both Rock music and Hip hop music since their inception.
One other interesting argument about how timbre affects us is that it is based on our brain’s speech recognition mechanism, as the timbre of the human voice is one of the ways we process language and gauge emotion in everyday speech. This link is explored in an article by Kate Heidemann, as she writes, “breathiness and extensions of this voice quality can be impacted by the shape of the vocal tract, as well as how the vocal folds are vibrating. For example, I can increase the breathiness of my voice by relaxing the muscles in my neck so that my pharynx collapses a little bit, and perturbs the flow of air after it passes through my vocal folds. The result is still an impression of muscular relaxation, and supports the physical and conceptual relationship between many popular singing styles and everyday speech”. A similar connection may be at play in Lo-Fi music, where we would associate the sound of a cassette, or a vinyl record, or even just a certain recording quality with older recordings that we may have listened to while growing up. So not only do these recordings cause a certain emotional response somewhere in the neighborhood of sad, but they could very easily be imparting a wistful, nostalgic feeling to the listener by subconsciously reminding them of their childhood.
Section 3: Why?
As we have discussed how timbre and Lo-Fi music work together, now we can analyze the proliferation of these qualities. So, what do these recording qualities mean today? I would argue the presence of Lo-Fi signifiers evokes feelings of nostalgia and melancholy in the listener, as well as giving an impression of authenticity and emotional rawness that differs significantly from the emotions a professional recording might evoke.
Another question is why have these qualities exploded so much in popularity over the last few years? Well, in a world that is becoming increasingly digitized and “perfect”, with an endless amount of ways to clean up pictures, recordings, and anything else you can think of to leave them spotless, a form of music with audible imperfections might feel like a breath of fresh air. Another factor to consider is how the rise in the popularity of Emotional Rock, or Emo Rock, in the early 2000s, with bands like Weezer, Blink 182, and My Chemical Romance might have created a space for these Lo-Fi recordings to resonate with more people. There’s the idea that, like the folk revival of the 1960s, anybody could make these recordings at home for any amount of money and disseminate them over the internet, while starting communities where people can share their techniques for creating these sounds and textures. And finally, there’s the fact that many more people today have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and music that puts emotions like sadness and nostalgia upfront could resonate very strongly with people in this state.
Conclusion
Overall, Lo-Fi music is an incredibly popular example of how the choice of timbre in popular music can evoke certain emotions, and in this increasingly connected age, even start subcultures. Techniques that create this Lo-Fi quality, such as a small amount of distortion, a limited frequency band, improper or non-traditional recording and mixing, and actually recording on vintage devices and media, are very accessible to the average person, which has only increased the proliferation of this music. It remains to be seen if other cultures will start up, either on the internet or more locally, based around other manipulations of recording timbre, that evoke emotions previously unheard of in music.
Bibliography
Fink, Robert, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark. 2018. The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hailstone, Julia C, Rohani Omar, Susie M D Henley, Chris Frost, Michael G Kenward, and Jason D Warren. 2006. “It's Not What You Play, It's How You Play It: Timbre Affects Perception of Emotion in Music.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006). Taylor & Francis. April 17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683716/.
Heidemann, Kate. 2016. “A System for Describing Vocal Timbre in Popular Song.” Music Theory Online. Society for Music Theory. March 1. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.1/mto.16.22.1.heidemann.html.
Harper, Adam. 2014. “Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Popular Music Discourse.” Oxford University Research Archive. Oxford University. March. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cc84039c-3d30-484e-84b4-8535ba4a54f8/download_file?safe_filename=AHarper+-+Lo-Fi+Aesthetics+Thesis.pdf&file_format=application/pdf&type_of_work=Thesis.
