The Problem

Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud have no shortage of lush, rainy, chill songs and soundscapes to keep you calm and stress-free as you focus on your tasks. They freckle the internet in playlists under benign keywords such as “concentration”, “focus”, “ambient”, “lofi” and “study”, you know the ones I mean. But don’t be fooled. They’re hardly harmless freckles. They’re more like malignant moles. If you don’t cut them out of your life, they will suck the energy from your very soul.

They mostly present in two-subgenres, with the overarching genre being Pure Evil.

Caution

Trigger Warning!

The next two headings contain real Spotify playlists that demonstrate the dangerous effects of these playlists. If you are operating heavy machinery, pregnant or breastfeeding, have a heart condition, or are a known fall risk, please consider skipping ahead.

Lo-Fi

• The cover art is an anime girl studying.
• You can’t remember the title: “Was it ‘ambient lofi study’ or ‘lofi study ambient’?”
• You can’t name a single artist on the playlist.
• You can’t even name a single song.

To help you identify, see the below playlist. Tread carefully.

Soundscapes

• There’s no music, just sounds.
• Involves coloured noise of some sort: white-noise, pink-noise, brown-noise.
• Rain, waterfalls, thunderstorms, birds, rainforests and forest walks.
• Low-key intuition that someone French made the playlist.

Here’s an example. Don’t fall asleep!

“What’s the big fuss about? These sound nice, don’t they?” you think, probably. And yes, they do. But “nice” doesn’t put bread on the table and you know it.

Have you ever applied for a job and employed the phrase “work well under pressure” (or some variation), somewhere in the process? No doubt you have, the stats don’t lie. You’d be in the company of 75% of the US workforce.

Now it’s time for a self-check…

If you truly believe you work well under pressure, stop doing yourself a disservice and sinking yourself into a cozy aural spa-bath when you want to get work done!

The Solution

To be fair, you can’t blame yourself. Any real alternatives are sorely lacking. We need content tailored to true productivity, not whitelabelled Yoga music that makes everyone numb and dumb. Those with some self-awareness try to hype themselves up with gas-station metal or doofy B-grade gym pop they don’t even like. Productivity-centric soundscapes are the summit of sonic empowerment, yet so far out of reach, no one has dared to dream of them. Until now…

Today I propose the concept of the Stress-Scape™…

Here’s a taste of a single I’m working on:

Corporate Skyscraper Fire Evacuation 🔥😱

Complete with screams, sirens, quickening flames and all the keystrokes of a thousand employees madly finishing an email before their building collapses.

I’m aware different people have different stressors, so if a burning building isn’t your thing, take heart – a full album is in the works! Including 14 hustle-inducing hits:

The Method

For a long time, this album was just a pipe-dream. Thanks to key innovations and cutting-edge technological advancements made possible by AI, it’s a reality.

Stress-Scapes™ implements these key attributes for peak productivity panic:

• AI-Powered Realistic Gibberish
  Many of these tracks will attempt to alienate you with highly realistic speech of almost-words, using the sonic crumbs of LLM latent-space. A foreign language is native to someone, and no one deserves to feel excluded in being excluded. That’s why we have carefully sampled phonemes from a multitude of languages, including rare ones from Arabic, German, French, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Sindhi, Somali, Zulu and, Xhosa.

• Degraded AI SFX
  Many of the sound effects are completely syntheised from AI text prompts. You can thank ElevenLabs’s cutting edge generative AI audio for the sound effects and realistic office-worker chatter. While high-quality and realistic by design, adding the suffix “but just a bit off…” tweaks each sound effect to incorporate some uncanny strangeness that leaves you feeling a little bit unsafe.

• Well-Disguised Shepard Tones
  A key feature throughout the album. Shepard tones bring tension that never resolves. The sonic equivalent of stairs the never stop climbing, hidden shepard tones create the sensation of endless escalation.

• Hyper-Precise Binaural Audio
  This puts the stress where it belongs — right behind you. Binaural recordings and simulations position sounds with unsettling realism. You’ll need headphones to experience it properly.

• Unpredictable Rhythmic Disruptions
  Any mental foothold you expect in sonic patterns or structure is quickly subverted. That frustrated feeling you get when you’re between department stores that are playing two different songs? Bottled up just for you.

The End

None of this would work if these Stress-Scapes weren’t crafted to leave room for you.

They are the backdrop for your productive work and will never encroach on your main-character energy.

Keep Calm Keep Panicked and Carry On.

Tip

For those who have questions…

1. Yes, it’s a joke.
2. I am actually working on an album of Stress-Scapes.
3. No, Stress-Scapes isn’t really trademarked… Yet.