Ambient and Lo-Fi
Two styles that share a mood and almost nothing else. Lo-fi inherits jazz harmony from hip hop; ambient largely abandons harmonic function, because function implies a destination and a destination implies an ending.
- no peaks
- small note pool
- loops of unequal length
In which styles
- Ambient
- Lo-fi
- Downtempo
- Film music
In short
Functional harmony works through tension and resolution: a dominant with a leading tone announces an ending. Ambient removes that machinery and treats chords as colour. Lo-fi keeps the seventh and ninth chords of jazz but strips them of direction by looping them.
Unhurried to the point of being furniture, deliberately. The music is designed not to demand anything from you.
How the style works
In ambient, tempo is often not a useful concept at all. There is no pulse, or the pulse is so far apart that it stops reading as metre. What takes the place of a groove is the relationship between loops of unequal length, which drift in and out of phase and never repeat in the same combination.
Where you run into this
- A piece with no beat where the reverb tail is the rest of the phrase
- Two loops of different lengths that take minutes to line up again
- A lo-fi track where the only movement is tape wobble
What you leave out
Dynamic peaks. No build, no drop, no louder chorus. Every peak demands attention, and that is exactly what neither style wants. The difference between the quietest and busiest passage is in density and timbre, not volume.