Why Lo-Fi Beats Stop Working After the Third Hour

I'm a designer, not a sound person. I can't work in silence, and I can't work to music that has any shape to it, because I end up listening. Lo-fi playlists are the standard answer to that problem, and for the first hour they are a good one. This is what I found when I tried to understand why the effect fades.

What lo-fi gets right

Three things, as far as I can tell. There are usually no words. Nothing dramatic happens: no drop, no chorus, no jump in volume. And it is soft enough to cover small noises in the room without asking for attention.

The first of these has research behind it. A review of 65 studies on reading with background sound found that speech and music with lyrics were the most disruptive kinds. Take the words out and you remove the biggest problem.

Where it wears out

Lo-fi is still music. Under the vinyl crackle there is a beat and a chord pattern a few bars long, repeated for two or three minutes until the next track starts. The next track is usually built from the same small set of chords, drum patterns and textures.

The first time through, none of that matters. After the tenth, you know the little piano figure before it arrives. That moment of recognition is the problem. Noticing "this again" is a small interruption, and a loop delivers it on schedule.

The beat adds to it. A pulse is something to follow, and following is the thing background sound is supposed to spare you. There is more on that in Is a Beat the Enemy of Concentration?.

What I couldn't find

I looked for studies on lo-fi specifically and found only a few small ones. The same review found that music, speech and plain noise all had a small negative effect on reading. So I can't point to evidence that lo-fi helps with focus. It may simply be pleasant, which counts for something. The loop explanation above is my own reading of why it stops feeling good. Treat it as that.

What doesn't wear out

There seem to be two ways out.

One is noise. Brown or pink noise has no loop to learn, because every second is the same as the last. It can feel flat after a while. I compared the two options in Brown Noise vs Ambient Sound.

The other is sound that keeps the same mood and is never the same twice, like rain behind a real window. That is the one I ended up building. In Ambient Sound Online, shapes drift around the screen and make a sound when two of them meet. There is no track underneath, so there is no loop to recognise. I have worked to it for hours at a stretch, which is the only test I trust.

If you want to stay with lo-fi

• Use a long live stream instead of a short playlist, so repeats come round less often.
• Keep it quieter than you think you need.
• When you catch yourself hearing the loop, switch. The effect has already gone.

Sources

• Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele, 2018: review of 65 studies on background sound and reading