Vaporwave

Style overview

Vaporwave rarely writes a melody from scratch. It takes commercial music of the eighties and nineties — corporate video beds, mall background music, smooth radio pop — slows it down, drops the pitch and floods it with reverb. Tempos land between 60 and 90 BPM, and the roughness is deliberate: tape wobble, blurred highs, loops that cut off mid-phrase. The joke is aimed at consumer culture.

Sound characteristics

Tempo: 60–90 BPM, usually the result of slowing source material by 10–25%. The slight instability of that speed is part of the aesthetic, not a flaw.
Time signature: 4/4, but the drums come from slowed samples, so they wobble. Nothing is tightly quantized; timing error is preserved on purpose.
Instrumentation: Pitched-down electric piano, jazzy synth bass, lazy sax and brass lifted from sample sources, wrapped in long plate reverb and chorus, with early home-computer beeps and shopping-mall announcements laid over the top.
Vocals: Almost all vocals are sampled. Pitched down they turn thick and sluggish, often chopped into half-phrases that loop; unintelligible lyrics are expected rather than avoided.
Song structure: Loop-based. A four- or eight-bar sample repeats for minutes, with filtering, added reverb and abrupt silence standing in for sections. Verse-chorus form barely applies.

Use cases

Retro-web and nineties-aesthetic visual content
Gallery, exhibition and installation loops
Late-night study and idle listening, slow enough to stay out of the way
Short films set in malls, arcades and convenience stores
Ironic brand campaigns and experimental advertising

FAQ

How does vaporwave differ from lo-fi hip-hop?: Both are slow and hazy, but the raw material differs. Lo-fi hip-hop programs new drums under jazz chords and keeps a steady, unobtrusive pulse. Vaporwave takes an existing recording and transforms it through pitch, speed and reverb, keeping the structure loose and the commercial nostalgia audible.
I have no source samples. Can AI still produce this?: Put the processing into the prompt rather than the source: 'slowed playback, pitched down a semitone or two, long plate reverb, tape wobble, rolled-off highs, four-bar loop repeating'. Then describe the material — eighties corporate-video electric piano and brass — and the texture arrives.
Why do my generations sound too clean?: You are missing the damage. Add tape flutter, high-frequency roll-off, light clipping and audible loop seams, and specify no modern mastering. Half of this style's identity comes from imperfection; polish it and you simply have slow ambient electronica. Ask explicitly for a lo-fi, unmastered render.

YinsoAI