Lofi X living in the city
Channel: RYT-lofi-music
Date: 2024-01-06

Evolution of "lo-fi"
At its most crudely sketched, lo-fi was primitivist and realist in the 1980s, postmodern in the 1990s, and archaicist in the 2000s.

—Adam Harper, Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Popular Music Discourse (2014)[7]
Lo-fi is the opposite of High fidelity. Music educator R. Murray Schafer, in the glossary for his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, defined the term as "unfavourable signal-to-noise ratio."[8]

There was virtually no appreciation for the imperfections of lo-fi music among critics until the 1980s, during which there was an emergent romanticism for home-recording and "do-it-yourself" (DIY) qualities.[4] Afterward, "DIY" was often used interchangeably with "lo-fi".[5] By the end of the 1980s, qualities such as "home-recorded", "technically primitive", and "inexpensive equipment" were commonly associated with the "lo-fi" label, and throughout the 1990s, such ideas became central to how "lo-fi" was popularly understood.[6] Consequently, in 2003, the Oxford Dictionary added a second definition for the term—"a genre of rock music characterized by minimal production, giving a raw and unsophisticated sound".[6]

The identity of the party or parties who popularized the use of "lo-fi" cannot be determined definitively.[2] It is generally suggested that the term was popularized through William Berger's weekly half-hour radio show on the New Jersey-based independent radio station WFMU, titled Low-Fi, which lasted from 1986 to 1987.[2][9] The program's contents consisted entirely of contributions solicited via mail[10] and ran during a thirty-minute prime time evening slot every Friday.[9] In the fall 1986 issue of the WFMU magazine LCD, the program was described as "home recordings produced on inexpensive equipment. Technical primitivism coupled with brilliance."[9]

A third definition was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2008: "unpolished, amateurish, or technologically unsophisticated, esp. as a deliberate aesthetic choice."[6] In 2017, About.com's Anthony Carew argued that the term "lo-fi" had been commonly misused as a synonym for "warm" or "punchy" when it should be reserved for music that "sounds like it's recorded onto a broken answering-machine".[2]

Bedroom pop
The notion of "bedroom musicians" first emerged in the 21st century following the rise of laptop computers in many forms of popular or avant-garde music.[11] Since then, there had been an increasing tendency to group all home-recorded music under the umbrella of "lo-fi".[12] From these developments came "bedroom pop", a loosely-defined music genre[13] referring to artists who record at home, rather than at traditional recording spaces.[14]

"Bedroom pop" has also been invoked to describe a distinct aesthetic.[15] Writing in 2006, Tammy LaGorce of The New York Times identified "bedroom pop" as "bloglike music that tries to make the world a better place through a perfect homemade song".[16] By the 2010s, journalists would indiscriminately apply the term to any music with a "fuzzy" production quality,[17]

Daniel Wray of The Guardian defined the term in 2020 as a genre of home-recorded music with a "dreamy, introspective and intimate" sound, and one which spans "across indie, pop, R&B and emo".[18] Jenessa Williams of The Forty-Five called "bedroom pop" almost synonymous with "lo-fi", having been traditionally used as "a flattering way to dress up homespun demos and slacker aesthetics" before being recontextualized in later years as "midwestern emo without the thrashing; Soundcloud rap without the braggadocio."[19]

Many of the associated artists have rejected the label.[20]

Characteristics
See also: Noise in music and Recording studio as an instrument
External videos
video icon Todd Rundgren's "Sounds of the Studio" from Something/Anything?, YouTube video
Lo-fi aesthetics are idiosyncrasies associated with the recording process. More specifically, those that are generally viewed in the field of audio engineering as undesirable effects, such as a degraded audio signal or fluctuations in tape speed.[21] The aesthetic may also extend to substandard or disaffected musical performances.[22] Recordings deemed unprofessional or "amateurish" are usually with respect to performance (out-of-tune or out-of-time notes) or mixing (audible hiss, distortion, or room acoustics).[23] Musicologist Adam Harper identifies the difference as "phonographic" and "non-phonographic imperfections". He defines the former as "elements of a recording that are perceived (or imagined to be perceived) as detrimental to it and that originate in the specific operation of the recording medium itself. Today, they are usually the first characteristics people think about when the subject of 'lo-fi' is brought up."[24]

Recording imperfections may "fall loosely into two categories, distortion and noise", in Harper's view, although he acknowledges that definitions of "distortion" and "noise" vary and sometimes overlap.[25] The most prominent form of distortion in lo