Abstract
“Beats to relax/study to” supposedly help you focus and chill, but what about this kind of music, if anything, makes it appropriate for these functions? Is it because it is largely instrumental? Are there some significant rhythmic or structural aspects? Or is it just because of how it is labelled?
This presentation will explore an aspect of an ongoing project titled FUNCTUMUS: the functional turn in music, which investigates what happens to musical practice when music is appropriated for functional use such as mood management and activity enhancement. As a case, the project uses the genre of lofi hip-hop, which was labelled “beats to relax/study to” in the late 2010s by online curators.
I will first introduce my project, before going on to suggest a tentative framework to explore its connection to its prescribed functions, linking them to theories of attention, prediction, and relaxation.
Bio
Joseph Coughlan-Allen is a MSCA postdoctoral researcher at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Rhythm, Time, and Motion and the Department of Music at the University of Oslo. He completed his PhD at University of Liverpool, where he also collaborated with the Institute of Popular music. His research background is in the study of recorded music, particularly how listeners construe, interpret, and articulate meanings from music recordings and their content.