In the Mood

You are reading this in a café, the steam wafting gently off your coffee, a soft rain pattering on the window outside. You are in an old library late at night, with the creak of old chairs and the scratching of a pencil from a writer immersed in their thoughts. You are in a dense, foggy forest in the shadow of a mountain where your party has set up temporary camp, hoping no belligerent creatures wander through during the night. Hours tick by as these atmospheres spool out from your computer screen and speakers. Before moving to your next piece of business, you glance at your browser window to confirm: The coffee is still hot; the monsters have yet to arrive. The scene is set for your everyday activities, but only within the frame of the platform itself.

These “ambience videos,” each streaming on YouTube, epitomize a transformation in mood-regulating media: Where ambient media once intervened in the mood of an existing space, newer forms promise instead an atmospheric escape from wherever you find yourself. (...)

Today’s ambience videos share many of the same basic aesthetic principles as the earlier ambient works. They invite audiences to let them play while attending to other things, and they are designed to accompany everyday activities like studying, reading, and sleeping. However, ambience videos break decisively with the earlier focus on augmenting existing locations, aiming instead to act as an immersive perceptual substitute for the immediate physical environment. They provide not just an accompaniment but an alternative space within which everyday activities can take place. Like Kotler’s in-store atmospherics, these ambiences are both branded and self-contained.

Both ambient and ambience approaches aim to make everyday life more atmospherically controllable through media, but ambience shifts the locus of this control away from those in the local environment and toward more fully commodified ambience channels. By reframing everyday mood regulation as an escapist activity, ambience videos bring it more completely within the walled-garden logic of platform capitalism. Rather than a person curating their own local ambience, YouTube ambience channels situate moods as accessible via the platform alone, just as long as the browser tab stays open. (...)

In 2017, taking advantage of YouTube’s then-novel streaming features, channels began popularizing “live” ambiences that audiences could tune into anytime they like. The most famous among these is the 200+ million view “lo-fi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to” (launched in February 2017), which depicts a girl studying in front of a large window looking out on an atmospheric cityscape. Throughout the day, that landscape shifts to feature soft glowing city lights and, at times, rain falling softly just beyond the glass. A cat on the windowsill keeps continuous watch over what is happening outside, providing both the girl and stream audiences reassurance that it is safe to look away and return to our work. Neither the girl nor the cat pay any attention to the rest of the room, including the open laptop nearby and the wide range of physical media visible around the edges of the scene. In this way, the lo-fi girl models the new approach to ambience as entirely contained by the frame: Pay no mind to the cluttered room in which you find yourself; seek to draw your mood instead entirely from the scene streaming in through a nearby window.

The YouTube ambience videos emerging in lo-fi girl’s wake take a cue from this frame-within-a-frame format, deploying on-screen windows to hint at an external world of atmospheric weather while simultaneously providing reassurance this larger world won’t intrude on the cozy space the viewer is ensconced within. Channels like Calmed by Nature that had provided more generic relaxation videos (“Calming Wave Sounds,” “Mountain Creek”) began adopting the out-the-window ASMR ambience with videos like “Winter Snowstorm Ambience in Fire Lookout Tower with cracking fire, wind, & blizzard sounds” (April 2017).

Eventually the virtual café emerged as a favored place to situate these cozy moods, particularly after actual cafes became inaccessible amidst the 2020 pandemic lockdown. Calmed by Nature’s “Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music and Rain Sounds – 8 Hours” (March 2020) provides a typical example. The visual aesthetic is heavy on the hygge: soft pools of light, hot beverages, and colors that one ambience video creator describes as “warm, buttery hues” are conspicuous in an otherwise empty coffee shop. These interior designs are paired with a steady evening rain dripping from the eaves just outside the large street-facing windows. Candles flicker and mugs steam next to an open book and an open journal, as if their owners had just stepped away briefly (for eight hours). Smooth jazz lies low in the audio mix underneath the rain and the slightest hint of people talking somewhere offscreen. The attached hashtag #coffeeshopambience currently appears on over 650 videos across 168 different YouTube channels, each a variation on this basic style.

As Eliza Brooke notes in a recent New York Times piece, the pandemic appeal of these videos is pronounced: Their focus on the threshold of indoors and outdoors signals protection in the face of environmental exposure while simultaneously offering a warm and compensatory — yet never distracting — sense of community and spatial belonging for the socially distanced. But the focus on a specifically retail atmospherics is also far from accidental, echoing Kotler’s earlier promotion of the atmospheric in-store brand. Much like a latte purchase now often serves as a ticket to dwell for a few hours in a well-curated, comfortably franchised space, these videos situate ambience as an on-demand branded experience. If after eight hours you still want more, channels like ASMR Rooms and Calmed by Nature have in-platform stores with the usual mugs, T-shirts, and tote bags.

by Paul Roquet, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Cozy Coffee Shop (YouTube)