Episodes we love: Lofi Girl

Amory. Ben. The greatest hits that keep on coming. Hell yeah. We're revisiting some favorites from the archives to introduce the newcomers to the show to how we roll. Yeah, and also how we chill, which is a little clue about this next Encore episode. So grab your headphones, your notebook, your cozy clothes, your pencil. Yep, snuggle up next to that favorite window of yours with your cat and enjoy. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Let producer Nora Sachs and I introduce you to Kevin.

My name is Kevin Weatherwax, he, him pronouns. I'm a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When you hear Kevin's credentials, you might be surprised to immediately after that hear how hard studying and schoolwork has been for pretty much his whole life. So I had a really kind of atypical path through school. I was a high school dropout.

I kicked out over and over again. You know, as a kid, I got all these, you know, diagnoses really young about why what was wrong with me. And that kind of just pursued me through my life. Right. And it was always this thing. Well, what's wrong with you? How can you be more like other people and stop being like you? Kevin would eventually be diagnosed with ADHD.

which was listed as the source of his academic challenges. Kevin was a curious person and a hard worker, though. Eventually, in his mid to late 20s, he dove back into school. He says there was a lot of relearning he had to do. Part of which was just... learning how he could do work in the right way. Really early on, what I found is in my kind of work and study practices that it was really beneficial for me to sort of carve out, you know, feelings of anxiety.

and frustration or worrying about the future and stay focused in my space that i was in if i had um some kind of ambient music kind of low-key stuff going on Kevin was an early adopter of early internet-based ambient music listening channels, some of which were on YouTube. They used visuals often connected with anime, which helped too. They made me feel calm. and safe and i would kind of curate my workspace to even sort of not just use the music but i would include the visuals when i could

As in have a screen up with the actual visual as well as listening to the music while he was studying. Then somewhere towards the end of his undergrad degree or beginning of his doctoral program. I've always joked, Michael, I was working in the lab late one night, which was accurate, and I was... He was working in the lab late one night. And he discovered the be-all, end-all of Study Buddies.

a YouTube channel with a girl sitting at a window that looks out onto a European cityscape doing her own work and listening to lo-fi hip-hop. Kevin was far from alone.

He was part of an exploding audience for a mysterious and popular YouTube channel, which would have several names, but would be most commonly referred to as Lo-Fi Girl. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Nora Ruth Valerie Sachs. And you're listening to Endless Thread from WBUR Boston's NPR station. Today, the story of a mysterious pal whose simple presence has turned into a phenomenon.

inspired copycats, and probably has helped a ton of people get a ton of schoolwork done. This is the Lo-Fi Girl Multiverse. Emily Heap, a 29-year-old marketing specialist and makeup artist from Cleveland, is a lot like Kevin. So how did Lo-Fi Girl come into your life? Oh gosh, I couldn't even pinpoint a year. There is one stream of music that Emily listens to on repeat, one that feels almost like her own personal soundtrack, the same one Kevin listens to.

So it got me through a lot of late nights of homework, long days at work, and I even listen to it now every night to go to sleep. The YouTube channel is officially called, quote, Lo-Fi Hip Hop Radio Beats to Study slash Relax To. It was apparently started by this young and somewhat mysterious French producer known only as Dimitri. It now plays an infinite 24-7 curated live stream of what is known as lo-fi hip-hop.

It's a type of mostly instrumental hip hop that features down-tempo beats with some low-fidelity elements thrown in that sort of creates a perfectly imperfect, kind of nostalgic, atmospheric, uber-chill vibe. It really helps you focus and calm and get in your peaceful place. This stream has become massively popular. It has 13 million subscribers.

a loyal following, and it's been a huge force in underground music. And yet somehow, it still feels like a secret, but one everybody knows about. Definitely an open secret. Any time of the day or night you start streaming this channel, there are tens of thousands of people streaming too. The animation transitions from day into night. The cityscape outside the window gets dark and lights come on.

in other windows. Even if you've never heard of this channel, you'd probably recognize the animation that goes with it. The anime-style girl with brown hair, big eyes, wearing headphones. She is always writing in her journal or studying at her desk in her cozy little room, petting her orange cat while it stares out the window.

There's just enough animation for it to not be static. It's a loop, but somehow it doesn't really feel like a loop. And it's been that way for years. But then, back in April... i was getting ready for work i worked from home that day and i went on as i do every single morning and i put on my lo-fi girl and she was gone

Meaning, she was out of the room in the animation. Which, if you're one of the millions who expect Lo-Fi Girl to be in her place, turning her head, playing with her pencil, on a loop like she always is, it was a huge change. Emily was so rattled, she started recording on TikTok. Hi guys, I just woke up. Everything is happening all at once. Let's go over the lo-fi girl lore, because shit is happening with lo-fi girl right now.

Before Lo-Fi Girl and her cat disappeared from the animation, a blue light in a far-off window had started blinking. And they turn their heads and they look at it because that is not normal. Normally she's looking at the computer. The shot zooms closer and closer to that blue window until it's inside. A door appears. And that's when I started to realize that... something a little deeper was going on.

So if you were on the Lo-Fi Girl stream on April 12th, instead of study girl doing her thing, you were zooming into this blue window, collectively staring at a door. There's keys jingling. Did it go? I was right! I was right! And he has a dog. This is Emily's TikTok reaction to the expansion of the Lo-Fi Girl universe, the debut of a whole new character and his own live stream. If Lo-Fi Girl's aesthetic is chill, steady vibes,

Lo-fi boy, or synth boy, is chill gamer vibes. He's sitting in front of a computer, Nintendo controller to his left, lava lamp to his right, with all kind of nerdy accoutrements sprinkled around him. And fittingly... His channel is Synthwave Radio. Beats to chiller game too. There is no bong, pipe, vape, chubbler. Nothing like that in sight.

But you know it's around there somewhere. Oh, yeah. It's under his other controller for sure. So, Ben, in the end, lo-fi girl didn't disappear. She just gained a cute little friend. And clearly this was all still a very big deal to devotees like Emily. Lo-fi girl, like I said, has always been kind of in the background, just a fun little character that's been a part of my life for so long. And when something...

changed uh it was it was then that I realized like oh my gosh I kind of do have this weird parasocial relationship with her Kevin defines parasocial this way. It's this idea that you can have an emotional connection to a character or a space or an idea that is presented to you in media that is... not reciprocated or can't be reciprocated by the nature of the relationship, essentially. Color Me is a little bit skeptical, even as a podcast host, of the idea of value in parasocial relationships.

But then again, I am a fan of this channel too. Kevin says people who form parasocial relationships aren't weird. They know it's one-sided and aren't under any illusion that the other party knows they exist, let alone is going to return their feelings. With the lo-fi girl's stream humming along next to him, as he would start to lose his focus, Kevin would glance over at this short animated loop he's seen millions of times before.

And this is part of how Kevin's interest in the channel transitioned from fandom to true academic study because he realized something. And I noticed that when she would get back to work in the loop where she would sort of. kind of phase out for a second and then start again, I was finding myself feeling prompted to get back to my own work. And I started thinking, well, that's...

It's really odd. Why am I taking behavioral cues from something that I know is going to occur every couple seconds and is just an animated character? How is this prompting me to do anything to change my behavior? So Kevin starts digging in, wanting to better understand, quote,

Parasocial relationships in the live streaming of non-human agents, their ability to influence human behavior in real time, and the important facets of streaming environments that facilitate this. That language is from an academic paper that Kevin co-wrote. He and his colleagues collected and analyzed data from the live chat windows, which is the main place streamers interact with each other, at least on YouTube.

They also did lots of exploratory interviews with people who listen and watch assorted lo-fi music streams. And a clear theme started to emerge. And I saw a lot of this thing of people talking about, oh, I... You know, oh, the lo-fi girl, she works in studies like I do. She's this kind of partner, this almost, you know, not a friend, but like someone that you relate to. A safe companion.

that you don't need to expend any energy interacting with, and yet helps you feel calm and stay focused. A key ingredient, aside from the music, is the environments the characters exist within.

It's this idyllic space or spaces because there's lots of different types of them. Right. But they do have that in common, that there's something inviting but not over-engaging. There's a degree of animation that invites... somebody to feel a part of the space, almost like this kind of window into this idyllic world, but it's not so engaging as to be distracting or to really encourage you to lose yourself in it.

And this connection to the character and or their space seemed to hit on a feeling of nostalgia for people or an escape to a different time or even world. But briefly, and without the need for high engagement.

you know a lot of the stuff is rooted in like adult swim bumps late night animation you know it's got anime there's an anime aesthetic to it there's So a lot of the old original songs had loops from old adult swim shows in them or even were just the little bump tracks that they play in adult swim. So I don't know if you're.

you were an adult person. Yeah. You're, you're, you're, you're, uh, I'm smoking what you're rolling. Um, I wouldn't fall asleep to that every night, every, every night for, for 10 years. For the uninitiated, Adult Swim is like Saturday morning cartoons for big kids. It started as late-night alternative programming on Cartoon Network, with special music from underground hip-hop artists, original shows, etc.

Again, this is something we would love to talk to Lo-Fi Girls creator Dimitri or Dimitri's team about. Did Adult Swim inspire them? But since they keep declining our requests, what we can say is that Adult Swim is very similar to lo-fi channels because of its distinctive vibe. And a lot of these channels, Nora, seem to connect to this sort of Nordic idea of coziness, or is it...

Is it Hyga? Hygie? I thought it was Hyga, but I think it's Hyga. Oh. Yeah, but I know exactly what you're talking about. And in addition to the Hyga-ness and nostalgia-based listening and viewing experience... People in the chats also openly discuss stress, fear, or trauma they're dealing with from school or work or really just being a human on the planet. People in the chats, they go in there and they leave just these positive comments. Hey, everybody that's doing this right now.

You're doing great. Keep trying. It doesn't matter if it feels bad. Like it's a surprisingly non-toxic environment. In his preliminary study. Kevin concluded that some users did form parasocial relationships and that this almost static animation and super chill lo-fi really does increase relaxation and focus.

But Kevin has another theory, too, one that's shaped his research into this. Oh, I think part of what's useful about this is some of the people that are using this are neurodivergent, like myself. And that something about this relationship to this character is almost like assistive technology for them. It's kind of co-opted or colloquial assistive technology. It's not designed.

with them in mind, but it happens to strike some specific chord that's helpful for people like me. More on lo-fi music and brains after the break. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. From the creator of Homeland, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series, The Beast and Me, as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences.

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Kevin Weatherwax has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. According to WebMD, it's the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder in children, one that can neither be prevented nor cured. It continues on into teenage and adulthood years and has lots of different kinds of symptoms. Many of which feel very familiar to me. In fact, when Kevin asked me about how I ended up on this lo-fi journey myself,

It's a great question. I suppose it's always tricky to say this kind of thing. I'm pretty sure I'm like undiagnosed ADHD. Not tricky. Anybody I think should be able to say that.

That's what it feels like. Because it is hard to get a diagnosis. Yeah, yeah. And you had to be an extreme problem, especially to be like an old, you know, in your 30s, 40s now, and have a diagnosis, which I do, from very, very young. I was a real... pain in the ass problem i'm putting i'm gonna do air quotes to the teachers and the people as around as the kids man i just i got slammed on me yeah but not if you were just if you were functional or able to

yeah engage with the space you aren't going to get it and as an adult you can't really it's like what are people to do yeah that's yeah so I think I do think that is like a fundamental part of my personality like I'm I can hyper focus But I'm also like extremely consistently and constantly distractible. Me too. Which is why I accidentally have two...

dissertation tracks that I'm having competing for which one's going to be the final one. One is on my human robots interaction research and one is on the lo-fi stuff. When it comes to assistive technology for neurodivergent people, Kevin says he's observed a strong tendency for interventions that seek to sort of

Transform someone from neurodivergent to neurotypical or neurotypical behaving rather than being augmentative, which is what I really like about the lo-fi. My relationship to lo-fi is part of my work and study practice and what I see other neurodivergent people. also having which is that it's augmentative it doesn't it's not about making me not be neurodivergent or to behave as someone who's neurotypical it just um helps butress some of the areas where i

struggle while building up my strengths. Another speculation that is not backed up by data yet. I think that there's a possibility that what these kind of media channels do for people that are neurodivergent is it allows them to participate in kind of social co-working without expending social capital that can be a higher cost for neurodivergent people. Another probably not coincidence.

Emily Heap, the Cleveland TikToker we talked to, also volunteered that she has ADD. And we should say that this is how she described it, although these days most people describe this disorder not as ADD, but ADHD. Either way... It kind of like tickles your brain the right way, if that makes sense. It just like scratches that itch in there. And I'm like, oh, it's perfect. Yep. And I can keep working.

Yes, yes. It helps me focus so much. Maybe it's a pharmaceutical company that's behind it. Who knows? Maybe. They're like, there's an Adderall shortage. Give them lo-fi.

So we know, anecdotally at least, that these lo-fi hip-hop music streams help neurodivergent folks like Kevin and Emily, and probably others, relax and focus. But not necessarily why, or how. What's really going on up there inside our nonkins? I wish I knew. I honestly wish I knew. But we did get some help. We turned to Dr. Conchetta Tomeno, a.k.a. Connie from the Bronx. I am the executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

I'm a board-certified music therapist with a master's and doctorate in music therapy and have been a music therapist for 44 years. Connie is a pioneer in the field of music therapy. and was a close friend and colleague of the late British neurologist, Oliver Sacks. Your uncle, right? Yeah, not related at all. I wish. No Uncle Oliver in the fam.

Nora Sachs' non-relative, Oliver Sachs, may be the only neurologist to ever have a big-budget movie made about his work, at least one that stars Robert De Niro. You work here? No, I live here. You don't look like a patient. I don't. Over the decades, Connie has witnessed music work magic as medicine. Is music a net positive on brain function? Oh, absolutely. I think I could say that. I think the science supports that too.

There was the old man who had a stroke and couldn't talk, but then all of a sudden started singing Old Man River. And the young girl who had seizures every night before she was about to fall asleep. Until Connie created and prescribed a music track. the rhythm would gradually get slower and slower and slower. So it would ease her brain into a more relaxed state. Softer landing. Exactly. And it actually worked. So I was very happy. Wow.

The reason music is used as and in therapy is because it engages all parts of the brain in different ways. And so we have a way of... Not only organizing the brain in a very purposeful way, but stimulating and arousing areas that may be a little out of sync. Take someone with ADHD. The main thing is that there's... Hyperactivity in different areas of the brain. Which makes it hard to focus. Because there's too much noise and too much activity going on. That distracts.

the type of focus that's needed to learn or to do a task. Okay, now listen up, because this is the coolest thing I've heard in a really long time. Music doesn't only engage your gray matter. The rhythm of the music can actually entrain the rhythm of the brain. This was like a galaxy brain explosion moment for me, Nora.

Connie says entrainment is basically when one stimulus influences another. The pulse at which those rhythms take place is now influencing the pulse at which the neurons are firing. What that makes me think of is like music can serve almost as a metronome for the way that... The brain is functioning and organizing information. Absolutely. So think about how a musician uses a metronome. Yeah. And they use it to stay in time in their performance or to be able to perform the...

the music with other musicians. Sure. The external rhythm actually does the same thing. And in fact, that's... Why it's effective with somebody with ADHD is it's providing a steady beat and organizing brain rhythms that the person internally isn't able to organize. One of the reasons lo-fi hip-hop music is such an awesome metronome for folks with hyperactive brains is because it's slow.

You know, 70 to 90 beats per minute, I believe is the standard for lo-fi. So that low rhythm in and of itself is producing a very relaxed state. Also, Connie says, it doesn't usually have a huge range of frequencies or sudden changes in pitch, which also helps our physiological state get calm. And yet there's just enough going on in the music to filter out background noises, but also engage your brain all at the same time.

Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how this all works on beta and theta waves and all that good stuff. But for now, I think we can safely say lo-fi music does have an influence on brain activity.

And I think it's because of that very regular rhythmic beat that is engaging the brain in such a way that helps regulate then how the brain is functioning. Another very exciting discovery. There's so much more to the lo-fi world than just our old digital friend lo-fi girl and her new friend, or as a boyfriend, lo-fi boy. If that channel really was the big bang,

The lo-fi universe has just kept on expanding and diversifying. Even beyond other very popular and very similar channels with almost identical names like college music's lo-fi hip-hop radio mellow chill study beats. Yeah, it's real close to home. Any identity that you can think of for the most part, you can go and look for that in lo-fi. And you'll probably find somebody who's made something for it. Muslim lo-fi. Christian lo-fi.

Very simply, we won the election. Left-wing lo-fi, right-wing lo-fi, Indian lo-fi. Boomer lo-fi. Where's my mom? You get the idea. That's our PhD computational media nerd Kevin Weatherwax again, by the way. Just for funsies, we Googled Jewish lo-fi. queer lo-fi. And at Kevin's recommendation, because it's one of his personal, very out there favorites, Bernie Sanders lo-fi. Mr. President, as I think everyone knows... I am once again asking you to listen to lo-fi music.

So we could have done this all day and very late into the night. We could have. And gotten some work done probably at the same time. Probably. It might have been even far more productive than we ever are. But I think what we really figured out is that the lo-fi universe is... is basically infinitely expanding, maybe even creating alternate dimensions. I'm pretty sure the pandemic had something to do with it. I agree with that.

We all had more time at home for chilling, and we all also really needed to chill. As he and his colleagues studied this expanding lo-fi girl multiverse, Kevin started to wonder something. Could there be a human? not a cartoon character version of this and what i found was there's a very popular channel in south korea called the man studying next to me studying by me um and he he's this young kid uh it must be in his early 20s or something who essentially would do these long

ish live streams of himself studying and then he would turn those into really long loops. I'm not exactly sure which channel he was talking about because I discovered so many of these. I know, right? Like, lo-fi is like Japan, Korea, the UK, Norway. Watching all of these and realizing the existence of so many flavors of lo-fi kind of broke my brain, Nora. Like, are we living?

clearly living in a computer program like are we just incredibly inspired by other creations of chill vibes like what is happening like i mean such a labor of love to just build something that is

You're like, oh, this other thing makes me feel really good, but I would also love to see myself in it. So I'm just going to make that. Learning from Kevin and Connie from the Bronx about the lo-fi girl multiverse was really surprising for me as a low-key lo-fi girl fan. Learning that these channels are good for me and my brain is great. But I also had started with a more skeptical question, one that I told you about, Nora. Is Lo-Fi Girl good for music?

Or is it, in a weird way, part of this general degradation of artistry? Let the algorithms take over and remove the person behind the art, etc. Yeah, it's a really good question. And I should say here that we tried our darndest to reach Dimitri, or really anyone from Lo-Fi Girl. We didn't get a response, except that they wanted to stay anonymous.

And we also contacted a bunch of their different artists around the globe. And they also seem not so into talking, which I kind of get, you know, they just want to have their alias or moniker and keep making their chill vibes. But one was game. So yeah, this is an upcoming track that I'm working on. Not quite finished. This is Antonio, a.k.a. Mondo Loops. generously walking me through a lo-fi hip-hop song, Work in Progress. Mondo means world in Italian, and Antonio makes a lot of guitar loops.

Antonia is based in northwest England, and he's a full-time producer, mostly of lo-fi hip-hop stuff. Also chill hop. A lot of hops, really. You're kind of hearing his music, so you get the idea. And now he started messing around with field recordings as well, of things like leaves crunching and twigs snapping, very ASMR. And before that, I sort of started off.

releasing some guitar-based music, mostly instrumental, just pure guitar stuff. And it sort of evolved into the sort of lo-fi thing quite naturally. It's quite a similar sort of sound palette. We wanted to talk to Antonio because, you know, again, I was just worried about this idea that maybe Lo-Fi Hip Hop Girl was so kind of in the background that it sort of just removed the artist from, I don't know, the art.

in a way, you know, turning people into more sort of faceless, nameless, chill music generator bots, right? But at least... For this young British producer, that didn't feel like the case. Actually, he says it was the exact opposite. Right. Antonio told us that a few years ago, very early on into his music career, he sent some demos to the team behind the Lo-Fi Girls stream.

who also now run a record label. And Lo-Fi Girl liked them and dropped some of his tracks into their playlists on Spotify and other streaming platforms. And this bumped his audience big time in the region of... A few hundred a week to tens of thousands a week. It was a big jump. Then they asked him to write a song for this compilation album they released called 1am Study Sessions. Yep.

They release whole-ass compilation albums of original music, all inspired by the original stream. They put it out on vinyl and YouTube. And since then, Antonio has released several albums with the Lo-Fi Girl label and contributed to loads more compilations since. And he characterized the Lo-Fi scene as super international, very collaborative, and generally pretty open and sharing.

My first impression was that infinite live streams like Lo-Fi Girl and a lot of its spinoffs wouldn't be great for producers like Mondo Loops. But Antonio didn't seem to feel flattened or anonymous. Or like he was just another lo-fi cog in the wheel or chill music generator bot at all? It works both ways because whilst it's not necessarily artist-focused...

The sort of model that it ran off quite naturally worked in the artist's favor financially when it moves on to streaming services. Not that it was the intention of the channel at all. But with sites like Spotify, you get paid.

uh obviously per listen um sure and with a lot of artists it can be a real struggle to get the sort of fan base and the following to get any sort of substantial earnings from spotify and apple and that sort of thing um you get paid sort of like four three or four dollars per thousand streams uh okay but when it comes to lo-fi music you've got the financial element of people put it on in the background and they'll listen to 100 songs 200 songs

while they're studying, which reflects in much higher streaming. And as an artist, it supported me financially to make this my full-time career. Without this, I don't think I'd be a full-time music producer.

I owe my career, really, to Lo-Fi Girl supporting my music. Nora, you may not be a Lo-Fi Girl superfan. But what do you come away from all of this with? Like, what does it make you think about?

Well, I'm not a super fan, but I've become a fan where I wasn't one before. And I actually have found myself like turning to the stream sometimes and listening to more of Mondaloops and other artists' music. And I mean, I love... thinking about how my brain is being engaged and also freed to focus and and I'm not saddled with this burden of like oh all the artists you know are just

musicified and this is bad for them. Like actually every time I stream them on Spotify or play it, I'm actively supporting an independent artist and this record label, which feels good. With a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny. Yes, here's part of my penny for you. But then I told a lot of friends too and everyone just seems somehow more chilled out and focused. It's weird. I mean did you discover that a lot of your friends knew about this?

Yeah, when I mentioned it, the name Lo-Fi Girl didn't click. But then when I described the music and the stream and the animation, they were like, oh, yeah, like I'm into that. I've been into that for a long time. Yeah, I think that's, you know, to me, what's really interesting is like the way you described it as like a secret that everybody knows about, you know, it's like.

We don't really talk about lo-fi girl, at least most of us don't, unless you're Kevin or Emily, right? But, like, I think it's just this interesting thing that, like... is actually a companion for a ton of people who are not actually talking about that companionship, right? And then also just the idea that it has this positive community that it's created.

where people are sort of like supporting each other and also just like being together in this sort of weird internet space. I think that stuff is really interesting. But I agree with you that the entrainment idea of the brain getting sort of like locked into a more productive state is really fascinating. And it's cool to get a glimpse.

of some things that we still really don't understand, thanks to people like Connie and Kevin, and Emily too. Yeah, and to feel just like there's something good for the listeners and good for the makers in internet music is... It's a rare feeling I'm going to cherish and keep jamming to. We did it, guys. We fixed it all. It's all fixed now. Everything's positive on the internet now. No problem. Everybody go home.

Go home and study slash vibe slash game slash chill, okay? Don't forget your chubbler. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced and co-hosted by me, Nora Ruth Valerie Sachs, with help from Endless Thread co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Dimitri, if you're out there.

Still love to talk. Our sound designer on this episode was the super chill Paul Vykus. The rest of our team is Samanta Joshi, Matt Reed, Amory Sievertson, Quincy Walters, Emily Jankowski, and Grace Tatter. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities, a lava lamp, an orange cat and a game controller. If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread. at wbur.org. Bye now.