Relaxation music: tracks, genres and apps for those who are tired

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The right music is what it takes to relieve stress after a hard day at work. Lifehacker presents a playlist with relaxing compositions and tells you where to look for music for relaxation.

45 tracks to help you relax

Most of the relaxing music selections include monotonous compositions that promote relaxation, but are completely unmemorable. Lifehacker took a different approach to compiling a playlist and added 45 different tracks to it: from ambient to jazz, from Sting to Eduard Artemiev. We hope you find something to your liking.

Play Playlist on Apple Music →

Listen to the playlist in "Google Play Music" →

6 music genres suitable for relaxation

If the Lifehacker playlist wasn't enough for you, look for new tracks on your own, focusing on specific genres. The music of the styles listed below has a moderate tempo, melancholy and not too emotional.

1. Jazz

Jazz is an extremely diverse form of musical art. Its significant share is not suitable for relaxation in any way, so it is better to concentrate on some sub-styles: cool jazz, smooth jazz or ambient jazz.

What to listen to first

If you are interested exclusively in background relaxing music, you can limit yourself to the results of the query relaxing jazz music in the search engine. If cool jazz is your thing, start with Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool album.

Prefer the lightest music of the genre? Then pay attention to smooth jazz. Compositions of this sub-style are in the repertoire of Fourplay, Quincy Jones, George Benson, Al Jerro.

For fans of abstract music, we recommend listening to the hegemon of ambient jazz from Germany Bohren & der Club of Gore.

2. Ambient

The style of electronic music, expressed by an atmospheric, unobtrusive sound and the absence of a clearly emphasized rhythm. It is easy to relax or even fall asleep with correctly chosen and favorite ambient music.

What to listen to first

When it comes to relaxation music, it's fair to mention Moby's 2016 four-hour album Long Ambients 1: Calm. Sleep. 11 tracks from 17 to 35 minutes long can be played at night.

And if you are interested in history, then start with Brian Eno's album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Western critics have hailed it as the release that has had the greatest impact on ambient.

3. Trip-hop

Trip-hop is characterized by a slow tempo, distinct bass lines and a depressing coloration of the music. The genre was popular in the 90s, but has influenced many contemporary musicians, including Gorillaz, Deftones and Nine Inch Nails.

What to listen to first

Cult albums of the genre: Dummy (1994) by Portishead and Mezzanine (1998) by Massive Attack.

4. Dream pop

Melancholic and atmospheric music with unpretentious pop melodies. Dream-pop can be different: from the founders of the genre from the 80s Cocteau Twins to the modern Lana Del Rey (although fans of the style are in no hurry to classify her work as a dream-pop heritage).

What to listen to first

The pioneers of the genre from the 80s and 90s are Cocteau Twins (Treasure and Heaven or Las Vegas albums) and Slowdive (Souvlaki album). If you want something newer, check out the work of DIIV, The Daysleepers, The Raveonettes.

5. Chill-out

Chill-out is a conventional genre designation, by which someone understands just light and relaxing music, and someone means compositions written for the soundtrack of elevators and shops.

The word "chill-out" has a special meaning among fans of progressive trance and progressive house. Here, chill-out is understood as a combination of modern disco music with synthesized sounds of strings, waves and whispering vocals.

What to listen to first

If you want to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of Ibiza and create an accompaniment to fantasies of Mediterranean sunset, try starting with the Café del Mar chill out music selections.

6. Indie

Another conventional genre that is usually attributed to independent music - one that does not belong to the pop environment, but is not rock in the classical sense. As a rule, in indie they record light and intelligent music of guitar bands. However, many of these bands appear on the radio, and their concerts attract thousands of fans.

General musical characteristics are even more difficult to highlight, so when choosing tracks for relaxation, you should be especially careful here.

What to listen to first

Great relaxing music can be found on popular indie albums of recent years: Total Life Forever by Foals, xx by The xx, Currents by Tame Impala.

3 relaxation music apps

The recommendations in this article are subjective, and the songs tend to be annoying. When music isn't relaxing, apps can help. Typically, they allow the user to influence the audio track creation process by providing the required set of nature sounds and instrument parts.

The mechanics are simple: the user selects the sounds he would like to hear and mixes them, assigning a separate volume for each nature noise or musical instrument.

Applications differ from each other in the number of sounds in the library and additional functions.

1. Relax Meditation

An intuitive application where you can select 12 sounds to play simultaneously. You can also configure the program to reproduce low-frequency noise (for those who believe in the power of binaural beats) or hypnotic meditation sessions in English. There is a shutdown timer.

Not all sounds and meditations are available in the free version, there is no function of playing music from the library.

2. Relax Melodies

Another app with a lot of free sounds and similar features. You can choose one of the preset sound combinations or save your own.

3. TaoMix

In this application, mixing is done by creating points with sounds on the screen and moving a circle between them: the closer the sound object, the louder. You can set the speed of movement of the circle or stop it, set the timer to turn off and save the most successful combinations.

The second version of TaoMix is available for iOS devices, owners of gadgets running Android will have to be content with the first one for now. There are not many differences between them: TaoMix 2 has more available sounds for download and more flexible playback settings.