I’m a published music artist on Spotify that makes instrumental hip hop/lo-fi beats, and I wanted to make another project.

In the beginnings of the COVID era, I noticed that my own mental health was suffering with the transition to being remote and socially distant - I was also stranded in the US as an international student, with my family halfway around the world, and crashing with extended family & friends outside of Los Angeles. My friends were all dealing with the same thing - there was a feeling of isolation & depression, everyone was lonely and having a hard time adjusting. I decided to address that through a music project, to make something that represented a feeling of comfort and reverie - the way us isolated people wished we felt. To be as deliberate with this effort as possible, I treated this EP as a design project, with a problem to be understood and solved.

The Design Question:

Framing this as a design question, and taking into account that as art it has an inherently personal aspect,

How might I… create a music project that delivers a comforting, emotional and dreamlike experience for the listener?

Research

Finding Inspiration

I’m a strong believer in giving people credit where it's due, which is why finding inspiration in artists that made the kind of music I wanted to make for the soundscapes I created was a key part of my process. I saw it as a form of competitive analysis, though the term predicates itself to opposition when artists are usually supportive of each other. The competitive analysis helped me model how I wanted my music to feel and sound to solve the design problem.

I assembled a playlist on Spotify, full of songs that all had incredible affective power. These songs took me into a self-contained emotional experience fueled by my own imagination, which is what I was going for with my own project. I found myself predisposed to entire projects by the artists A L E X (the beat tape 'Growing Up, Vol. 2') and Idealism (his ‘hiraeth’ & ‘rainy evening’ EPs) which gave me key information on how to construct a project with a cohesive mood and theme, as well as informing musical ideas like sound selection & arrangement.

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Research

Talking Out Our Feelings

To make my music, I talked to the people that I imagined would be listening to my music - my community. As this was personal content and we were being vulnerable and sensitive, I essentially conducted informal undirected interviews over text and phone calls to understand their struggles and emotions. While out of respect for privacy and keeping the friends I have, I can't share screenshots of conversations, here are some things those friends said:

• "I'm barely having the motivation to go outside, and it's killing me that I can't even see anybody."
• "I just found out that I'm literally coping with moderate to severe depression right now. This is what it feels like?"
• "Honestly, it's really tough and I just need some time away from my house right now. My family is really hard to deal with for so long."
• "I miss all of you - I feel really lonely right now."
• "My anxiety is getting a lot worse. Can you call me?"
• "Seeing people go out without masks and have huge parties right now is so frustrating, when I think about how many people they're putting at risk".

Ideation & Planning

Defining the Scope

How big, or small, this project would be was a deliberate choice. I had put out a project before this one, and the lesson I had learned is that being a new artist, a smaller project prevents a feeling of cognitive overload in listeners that are still in the process of connecting with & investing in your art.  Allowing me to optimise the quality of each track I put out? That's a bonus. Therefore, I kept this EP only 5 songs long, though I made more than that. Each track also averages at about 2:10 minutes long—long enough to have musical content & variation of substance, but short enough to keep a listener’s attention in the era of streaming (when songs have on average gotten shorter).

Design

Style Guide - but it's lofi ✨

My music style under the “nxmad” alias is empathetic and dreamy lo-fi hip hop. Lo-fi hip hop is a relatively new label, but its roots are in '90s hip hop pioneered by producers like J. Dilla, Madlib and Nujabes. Their music was lo-fi out of necessity rather than an artistic choice—but now that artistic choice is powerful, as it makes for something understated, intimate and easy to listen to. (Here’s an interesting paper out of Stanford that details this exactly!) In that spirit, I decided to lean into that for this project, while making it something that was characteristically “nxmad”.

The different songs on this project share certain foundations: a texture based on soft, gentle piano, electric piano or synth pad sounds; while the backbone is the steady rhythmic pulse of light drums, each of which are characteristic of the genre. Musically, I kept playing a tension-and release game with harmony dissonance and then bringing it back to safe convergence, to feel depth and progression—and the result feels beautiful. By doing that, it felt like I was mirroring an emotional exchange with the listener, to try and resonate with them.

Ambient sounds—rain, a vinyl player, a street ambience—played a huge part in establishing time and place, reaching across to interact & empathise with the listener in their world (a technique that, for me, was inspired by Hayao Miyazaki). At points, I weaponised old movie dialogue to incorporate behavioural nudges in the music—whether prompting the listener to imagine a cozy, safe nook, or clipping a word at the end of a track suggesting that the listener plays the EP “again”.

No sound feels intrusive, but they form a multifaceted atmosphere in every song—thanks to multiple drafts and a little agony over details that didn’t really matter to anybody but me.

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Design

The Cover

I took point on the cover with Photoshop, a composite of two images I photographed: a cloud-gilded sky at sunset, and a road sign reminding us to shelter in place. I designed it to feel huge and exploratory, like how we feel as we look at the sky or a horizon—where we feel a sense of possibility. Clouds have always been a part of my central artist aesthetic, as they have a visually light and floating texture, With vibrant shades of pink fading into white purple, I made use of the associated colour psychology so it felt like fantasy. I designed this cover to create the atmosphere we wished we had when we were (and still are) shut in and isolated from places and people we cared about.

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Outcomes

The Release

When I released the final product for my listeners into the world on the 22nd of September, 2020, I got some really positive reactions to it. Everyone had a different favourite song, and people were telling me it fixed quarantine. A little after the project, it seemed like people outside my usual pool of listeners really liked it as well. from the data:

• Got placed on more than 40 listener & curated playlists, including one with 137,000+ followers
• 20,000% more monthly listeners on Spotify
• 203x streams a week
• Just broke 10k streams on the project!

I'm incredibly proud of the progress I made in doing this project. This taught me to think even more granularly about a listening experience and pay much more attention to detail, and those lessons are going to carry forward to my designs with other media. Actually, see the project for yourself- if you'd like, listen to it while you look through the rest of my work!