"Lo-fi" and "DIY music" redirect here. For other uses, see Lo-fi (disambiguation) and DIY (disambiguation).

 

Not to be confused with Chill-out music or hip hop radio.

 

 

 

 

Lo-fi or lofi (short for low-fidelity) may be a music or production quality during which elements usually considered imperfections of a recording or performance are audible, sometimes as a deliberate aesthetic choice. The standards of sound quality (fidelity) and music production have evolved throughout the decades, meaning that some older samples of lo-fi might not are originally recognized intrinsically . Lo-fi began to be recognized as a method of popular music genre within the 1990s, when it became alternately mentioned as DIY music.

 

 

 

Harmonic distortion and "analog warmth" are sometimes misleadingly suggested as core features of lo-fi music. it's characterised by the inclusion of elements normally viewed as undesirable in professional contexts, like misplayed notes, environmental interference, or phonographic imperfections (degraded audio signals, tape hiss, then on). Pioneering, influential, or otherwise significant artists include the Beach Boys (Smiley Smile), R. Stevie Moore (often called "the godfather of home recording"), McCartney (McCartney), Todd Rundgren, Jandek, Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Beck, Pavement, and Ariel Pink.

 

 

 

Although "lo-fi" has been within the cultural lexicon for about as long as "high fidelity", WFMU disk jockey William Berger is typically credited with popularizing the term in 1986. At various points since the 1980s, "lo-fi" has been connected with cassette culture, the DIY ethos of punk, primitivism, outsider music, authenticity, slacker/Generation X stereotypes, and cultural nostalgia. The notion of "bedroom" musicians expanded following the increase of recent digital audio workstations, and within the late 2000s, lo-fi aesthetics served because the basis of the chillwave and hypnagogic pop genres.

 

 

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

 

—Adam Harper, Lo-Fi Aesthetics in popular music genre Discourse (2014)

 

Lo-fi is that the opposite of hi-fi. Historically, the prescriptions of "lo-fi" are relative to technological advances and therefore the expectations of ordinary music listeners, causing the rhetoric and discourse surrounding the term to shift numerous times. Usually spelled as "low-fi" before the 1990s, the term has existed since a minimum of the 1950s, shortly after the acceptance of "high fidelity", and its definition evolved continuously between the 1970s and 2000s. within the 1976 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, lo-fi was added under the definition of "sound production less good in quality than 'hi-fi'". Music educator R. Murray Schafer, within the glossary for his 1977 book The Tuning of the planet , defined the term as "unfavourable signal-to-noise ."

 

 

 

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. Afterward, "DIY" was often used interchangeably with "lo-fi". By the top of the 1980s, qualities like "home-recorded", "technically primitive", and "inexpensive equipment" were commonly related to the "lo-fi" label, and throughout the 1990s, such ideas became central to how "lo-fi" was popularly understood. Consequently, in 2003, the Oxford Dictionary added a second definition for the term—"a genre of rock 'n' roll characterized by minimal production, giving a raw and unsophisticated sound". a 3rd was added in 2008: "unpolished, amateurish, or technologically unsophisticated, esp. as a deliberate aesthetic choice."

 

 

 

The identity of the party or parties who popularized the utilization of "lo-fi" can't be determined definitively. it's generally suggested that the term was popularized through William Berger's weekly half-hour radio show on the New Jersey-based independent station WFMU, titled Low-Fi, which lasted from 1986 to 1987.The program's contents consisted entirely of contributions solicited via mail and ran during a thirty-minute clock time evening slot every Friday latest new hip hop acts. within the fall 1986 issue of the WFMU magazine LCD, the program was described as "home recordings produced on inexpensive equipment. Technical primitivism including brilliance.

 

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