Scientific findings

If you're new to my blog, I'm doing a project to learn about lofi hip-hop, and I'm writing a blog to document the progress. If you haven't, I strongly recommend you check out the first blog to this series. It will give you more context to this blog and all future blogs written by me. 

Since my last post, I've started to collect some more sources, and I did some research on some different scientific techniques relating to lofi. There are lots of different fancy words and technical terms people use to describe sounds that occur, and I want to get a solid understanding of what they all mean. Some of the terms I've come across so far are: Salient events, amplitude modulations, low fidelity, pavolian effect and a high-frequency blanket. I don't want to get too in-depth about what all of these mean in this blog, but I definately plan to explain all of these in my final product. 

Something I want to know is whether or not lofi producers keep these scientific terms things in mind while they're creating the music, or if they just play it solely by ear. I hope to soon reach out to some of my favorite lofi artists and ask them about their writing processes, and whether or not they're concious about these scientific techniques. During my research, another question I got was how much of the science is just cold hard science vs emotional response. An article I was reading by Tim Seppala talks about an artificial intelligence that can rate how good music is for concentration based off of science, and it didn't think lofi was very good. It said the drums were too distracting and brought you out of focus. I disagree with the robot on this one becuase to me, lofi is all about the emotion it evokes and the nostalgia it brings. Lofi hip-hop calls out to me the most when it has a nostalgic jazzy chord progression, and a calming sound effect like rain playing in the background. 

I think that I'm on a good track so far with the amount of information I've gathered and the plan I have going forward. For my next steps, I want to reach out to some lofi hip-hop artists that I listen to and ask them about their writing process, and whether or not they keep the scientific techniques in mind while producing or not. I also want to run an expiriment to see how listening to lofi hip-hop affects my concentration. I don't have an exact plan for the expiriment yet, but I have some ideas. Gonna get back to researching now, see you next week!