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Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes Musical tone and atmosphere over traditional Musical form or rhythm. Often "peaceful" sounding and lacking composition, beat, and/or structured melody,The Ambient Century by Mark Prendergast, Bloomsbury, London, 2003. ambient music uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening,Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening & Other Moodsong by Joseph Lanza, Quartet, London, 1995. and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation.Crossfade: A Big Chill Anthology, Serpents Tail, London, 2004. The genre evokes an "atmospheric", "visual",Prendergast, M. The Ambient Century. 2001. Bloomsbury, USA or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature may be included, and some works use or repeated notes, as in drone music. Bearing elements associated with new-age music, acoustic music such as the piano, string section and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.George Grove, Stanley Sadie, , Macmillan Publishers, 1st ed., 1980 (), vol. 7 (Fuchs to Gyuzelev), "André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry", p. 708: "in L'épreuve villageoise, where the various folk elements – couplet form, simplicity of style, straightforward rhythm, drone bass in imitation of bagpipes – combine to express at once ingenuous coquetry and sincerity."
The genre originated in the 1960s and 1970s, when new musical instruments were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer. It was presaged by Erik Satie's furniture music and styles such as musique concrète, minimal music, Jamaican dub reggae and German electronic music, but was prominently named and popularized by British musician Brian Eno in 1978 with his album ; Eno opined that ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting", however, in early years, there were artists that were pioneers in this genre, like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, etc. It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, growing a cult following by the 1990s.
Ambient music has not achieved large commercial success. Nevertheless, it has attained a certain degree of acclaim throughout the years, especially in the Information Age. Due to its relatively open style, ambient music often takes influences from many other genres, ranging from classical music, avant-garde music, experimental music, folk music, jazz music, and world music, amongst others.New Sounds: The Virgin Guide To New Music by John Schaefer, Virgin Books, London, 1987."Each spoke, tracing a thin pie-shape out of the whole, would contribute to the modern or New Ambient movement: new age, neo-classical, space, electronic, ambient, progressive, jazzy, tribal, world, folk, ensemble, acoustic, meditative, and back to new age... " New Age Music Made Simple
In his own words, Satie sought to create "a music...which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the noise pollution which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need."
In 1948, French composer & engineer, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète. This experimental style of music used recordings of natural sounds that were then modified, manipulated or effected to create a composition. Shaeffer's techniques of using and splicing are considered to be the precursor to modern day sampling.
In 1952, John Cage released his famous three-movement compositionKostelanetz 2003, 69–71, 86, 105, 198, 218, 231. 4'33 which is a performance of complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is intended to capture the ambient sounds of the venue/location of the performance and have that be the music played. Cage has been cited by seminal artists such as Brian Eno as influence.
In the summer of 1962, composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick founded The San Francisco Tape Music Center which functioned both as an electronic music studio and concert venue. (2025). 9780520248922, University of California Press. ISBN 9780520248922 Other composers working with tape recorders became members and collaborators including Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Their compositions, among others, contributed to the development of minimal music (also called minimalism), which shares many similar concepts to ambient music such as repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, and consonant harmony.
Many records were released in Europe and the United States of America between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s that established the conventions of the ambient genre in the anglophone popular music market. Some 1960s records with ambient elements include Music for Yoga Meditation and Other Joys and Music for Zen Meditation by Tony Scott, Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott, and the first record of the environments album series by Irv Teibel.
In the late 1960s, French composer Éliane Radigue composed several pieces by processing tape loops from the feedback between two tape recorders and a microphone. In the 1970s, she then went on to compose similar music almost exclusively with an ARP 2500 synthesiser, and her long, slow compositions have often been compared to drone music. (2025). 9789082649550 ISBN 9789082649550 In 1969, the group COUM Transmissions were performing sonic experiments in British art schools.Eliot Bates, " Ambient Music", MA thesis (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University, 1997, pg.19) Pearls Before Swine's 1968 album Balaklava features the sounds of birdsong and ocean noise, which were to become tropes of ambient music."
Between 1974 and 1976, American composer Laurie Spiegel created her seminal work The Expanding Universe, created on a computer-analog hybrid system called GROOVE. In 1977, her composition, Music of the Spheres was included on Voyager 1 and 2's Golden Record.
In April 1975, Suzanne Ciani gave two performances on her Buchla synthesizer – one at the WBAI Free music store and one at Phill Niblock loft. These performances were released on an archival album in 2016 entitled Buchla Concerts 1975. According to the record label, these concerts were part live presentation, part grant application and part educational demonstration.
However, it was not until Brian Eno coined the term in the mid-70s that ambient music was defined as a genre. Eno went on to record 1975's Discreet Music with this in mind, suggesting that it be listened to at "comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility", referring to Satie's quote about his musique d'ameublement.
Other contemporaneous musicians creating ambient-style music at the time included Jamaican such as King Tubby, Japanese electronic music composers such as Isao Tomita Q&A with Isao Tomita , Tokyo Weekender Isao Tomita, an Early Major Japanese Electronic Composer, Is Dead, Vice and Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as the psychoacoustics soundscapes of Irv Teibel's Environments series, and German experimental bands such as Popol Vuh, Cluster, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream. Mike Orme of Stylus Magazine describes the work of Kosmische Musik musicians as "laying the groundwork" for ambient.
The impact the rise of the synthesizer in modern music had on ambient as a genre cannot be overstated; as Ralf Hutter of early electronic pioneers Kraftwerk said in a 1977 Billboard interview: "Electronics is beyond nations and colors...with electronics everything is possible. The only limit is with the composer". The Yellow Magic Orchestra developed a distinct style of ambient electronic music that would later be developed into ambient house music.
In the liner notes for his 1978 album , Eno wrote:
Eno, who describes himself as a "non-musician", termed his experiments "treatments" rather than traditional performances.Brian Eno, , September 1978 (Quoting Brian Eno saying "La Monte Young is the daddy of us all" with endnote 113 p. referencing it as "Quoted in Palmer, A Father Figure for the Avant-Garde, p. 49".) David Bowie created the Berlin Trilogy with Eno, both of whom were inspired during the production of the albums in the trilogy by German kosmische Musik bands and minimalist composers.
In the mid-1980s, the possibilities to create a sonic landscape increased through the use of sampling. By the late 1980s, there was a steep increase in the incorporation of the computer in the writing and recording process of records. The sixteen-bit Macintosh platform with built-in sound and comparable IBM models would find themselves in studios and homes of musicians and record makers. However, many artists were still working with analogue synthesizers and acoustic instruments to produce ambient works.
In 1983, Midori Takada recorded her first solo LP Through the Looking Glass in two days. She performed all parts on the album, with diverse instrumentation including percussion, marimba, gong, reed organ, bells, ocarina, vibraphone, piano and glass Coca-Cola bottles. Between 1988 and 1993, Éliane Radigue produced three hour-long works on the ARP 2500 which were subsequently issued together as La Trilogie De La Mort.
Also in 1988, founding member and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, Pauline Oliveros coined the term " deep listening" after she recorded an album inside a huge underground cistern in Washington which has a 45-second reverberation time. The concept of Deep Listening then went on to become "an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation".
British artists such as Aphex Twin (specifically: Selected Ambient Works Volume II, 1994), Global Communication ( , 1994), The Future Sound of London ( Lifeforms, 1994, ISDN, 1994), the Black Dog ( Temple of Transparent Balls, 1993), Autechre ( Incunabula, 1993, Amber, 1994), Boards of Canada, and The KLF's Chill Out, (1990), all took a part in popularising and diversifying ambient music where it was used as a calming respite from the intensity of the hardcore and techno popular at that time. Other global ambient artists from the 1990s include American composers Stars of the Lid (who released 5 albums during this decade), and Japanese artist Susumu Yokota whose album Sakura (1999) featured what Pitchfork magazine called "dreamy, processed guitar as a distinctive sound tool".
In indie music, chillwave emerged, inspired by the atmosphere of dream pop. Atlas Sound debuted with the album Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel, which featured ambient pieces. Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion was an album released in January 2009 that was particularly influential for its ambient sounds and repetitive melodies.
Many uploaded ambient videos may also be influenced by biomusic where they feature Natural sounds, though the sounds would be modified with and delay units to make spacey versions of the sounds as part of the ambience. Such natural sounds oftentimes include those of a beach, rainforest, thunderstorm and rainfall, among others, with vocalizations of animals such as bird songs being used as well. Pieces containing binaural beats are common and popular uploads as well, which provide music therapy and stress management for the listener.How Music Works by David Byrne, McSweeney's, 2012.
Acclaimed ambient music of this era (according to Pitchfork magazine) include works by Max Richter, Julianna Barwick, Grouper, William Basinski, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Caretaker. In 2011, American composer Liz Harris recording as Grouper released the album AIA: Alien Observer, listed by Pitchfork at number 21 on their "50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time". In 2011, Julianna Barwick released her first full-length album The Magic Place. Heavily influenced by her childhood experiences in a church choir, Barwick loops her wordless vocals into ethereal soundscapes. It was listed at number 30 on Pitchfork's 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. After several self-released albums, Buchla composer, producer and performer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith was signed to independent record label Western Vinyl in 2015.
In 2016, she released her second official album EARS. It paired the Buchla synthesizer with traditional instruments and her compositions were compared to Laurie Spiegel and Alice Coltrane. Kaitlyn has also collaborated with other well-known Buchla performer, Suzanne Ciani. was released by American electronica musician Moby in 2016, as a free download. In March 2019, Moby released a follow-up ambient album, Long Ambients 2. Iggy Pop's 2019 album Free features ambient soundscapes. Mallsoft, a subgenre of vaporwave, features various ambient influences, with artists such as Cat System Corp. and Groceries exploring ambient sounds typical of malls and grocery stores.
Ambient house tracks generally lack a Diatonic scale center and feature much atonality along with synthesized chords. The Dutch Brainvoyager is an example of this genre. Illbient is another form of ambient house music.
Entire works may be based on radio telescope recordings, the babbling of newborn babies, or sounds recorded through contact microphones on telegraph wires.
Dream pop band Slowdive's 1995 album Pygmalion was a major departure from the band's usual sound, heavily incorporating elements of ambient electronica and psychedelia with hypnotic, repetitive rhythms, influencing many ambient pop bands and subsequently being regarded as a landmark album in the genre; Pitchfork critic Nitsuh Abebe described the album's songs as "ambient pop dreams that have more in common with first post-rock bands like Disco Inferno than shoegazers like Ride". The genre continued to stylistically progress in the 2000s, often in conjunction with indietronica.
Dark ambient features toned-down or entirely missing beats with unsettling passages of keyboards, eerie samples, and treated guitar effects. Like most styles related in some way to electronic/dance music of the '90s, it's a very nebulous term; many artists enter or leave the style with each successive release. Related styles include ambient industrial (see below) and isolationist ambient.
Subliminal messages are also used in new-age music, and the use of instruments along with sounds of animals (like whales, wolves and eagles) and nature (waterfalls, ocean waves, rain) is also popular. Flautist Dean Evenson was one of the first musicians to combine peaceful music with the sounds of nature, launching a genre that became popular for massage and yoga.
Space music ranges from simple to complex sonic textures sometimes lacking conventional melodic, rhythmic, or vocal components,"A timeless experience...as ancient as the echoes of a simple bamboo flute or as contemporary as the latest ambient electronica. Any music with a generally slow pace and space-creating sound image can be called spacemusic. Generally quiet, consonant, ethereal, often without conventional rhythmic and dynamic contrasts, spacemusic is found within many historical, ethnic, and contemporary genres."Stephen Hill, co-founder, Hearts of Space, sidebar "What is Spacemusic?" in essay Contemplative Music, Broadly Defined "The early innovators in electronic "space music" were mostly located around Berlin. The term has come to refer to music in the style of the early and mid-1970s works of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh and others in that scene. The music is characterized by long compositions, looping sequencer patterns, and improvised lead melody lines." – John Dilaberto, Berlin School, Echoes Radio on-line music glossary generally evoking a sense of "continuum of spatial imagery and emotion","This music is experienced primarily as a continuum of spatial imagery and emotion, rather than as thematic musical relationships, compositional ideas, or performance values." Essay by Stephen Hill, co-founder, Hearts of Space, New Age Music Made Simple beneficial introspection, deep listening"Innerspace, Meditative, and Transcendental... This music promotes a psychological movement inward." Stephen Hill, co-founder, Hearts of Space, essay titled New Age Music Made Simple and sensations of floating, cruising or flying."...Spacemusic ... conjures up either outer "space" or "inner space" " – Lloyd Barde, founder of Backroads Music Notes on Ambient Music, Hyperreal Music Archive "Space And Travel Music: Celestial, Cosmic, and Terrestrial... This New Age sub-category has the effect of outward psychological expansion. Celestial or cosmic music removes listeners from their ordinary acoustical surroundings by creating stereo sound images of vast, virtually dimensionless spatial environments. In a word — spacey. Rhythmic or tonal movements animate the experience of flying, floating, cruising, gliding, or hovering within the auditory space."Stephen Hill, co-founder, Hearts of Space, in an essay titled New Age Music Made Simple
Space music is used by individuals for both background enhancement and foreground listening, often with headphones, to stimulate relaxation, contemplation, inspiration and generally peaceful expansive moods" Restorative powers are often claimed for it, and at its best it can create an effective environment to balance some of the stress, noise, and complexity of everyday life." – Stephen Hill, Founder, Music from the Hearts of Space What is Spacemusic? and . Space music is also a component of many film and is commonly used in , as a relaxation aid and for meditation."This was the soundtrack for countless planetarium shows, on massage tables, and as soundtracks to many videos and movies."- Lloyd Barde Notes on Ambient Music, Hyperreal Music Archive
Ambient pop
Ambient pop is a leftfield indie style that developed in the 1980s and 1990s contemporaneously with post-rock in the first wave, deriving from indie pop. It incorporates structures that are common to Indie rock, but extensively explores "electronic textures and atmospheres that mirror the hypnotic, meditative qualities of ambient music", which is also central to indie electronic music. Ambient pop utilizes the musical experimentation of psychedelia and the repetitive traits of Minimal music, krautrock and techno as prevalent influences. It is distinguished by its adoption of "contemporary electronic idioms, including sampling, although for the most part live instruments continue to define the sound"; examples of bands in the style include Stereolab, Laika and Broadcast.
Ambient techno
Ambient techno is a music category emerging in the late 1980s that is used to describe ambient music atmospheres with the rhythmic and melodic elements of techno. Notable artists include Aphex Twin, B12, Autechre, and the Black Dog.
Dark ambient
Brian Eno's original vision of ambient music as unobtrusive musical wallpaper, later fused with warm house rhythms and given playful qualities by the Orb in the 1990s, found its opposite in the style known as dark ambient. Populated by a wide assortment of personalities—ranging from older industrial and metal experimentalists (Scorn's Mick Harris, Current 93's David Tibet, Nurse with Wound's Steven Stapleton) to electronic boffins (Kim Cascone/PGR, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia), Japanoise artists (K.K. Null, Merzbow), and latter-day indie rockers (Main, Bark Psychosis).
Drone music
Drone music is a minimal music genre of music that emphasizes the use of sounds, notes, or called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy compositions featuring relatively slight harmonic variations. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism."Young 2000, p. 27 Elements of drone music have been incorporated in diverse genres such as Rock music, ambient, and electronic music."Drone-based music" is used for instance in 1995 (Paul Griffiths, Modern music and after: Directions Since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1995, , p. 209: "Young founded his own performing group, the Theatre of Eternal Music, to give performances of highly repetitive, drone-based music"), or in Cow & Warner 2004 (cf. cited quote of p. 301).Cox & Warner 2004, p. 301 (in "Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism" by Kyle Gann): "Certainly many of the most famous minimalist pieces relied on a motoric 8th-note beat, although there were also several composers like Young and Niblock interested in drones with no beat at all. ... Perhaps “steady-beat-minimalism” is a criterion that could divide the minimalist repertoire into two mutually exclusive bodies of music, pulse-based music versus drone-based music."
New-age music
Ambient music fused with new-age music styles has an explicit purpose of aiding meditation music and relaxation, or aiding and enabling various alternative spiritual practices, such as alternative healing, yoga practice, guided meditation, or chakra auditing. The proponents of new age-ambient music are almost always musicians who create their music expressly for these purposes.Steven Halpern, New Age Voice Magazine, June 1999 issue To be useful for meditation, the music must have repetitive dynamic and texture without sudden loud chords or improvisation, which could disturb the meditator. It is minimalist in conception, and musicians in the genre are mostly instrumentalists rather than vocalists.
Space music
Space music, also spelled "Spacemusic", includes music from the ambient genre as well as a broad range of other genres with certain characteristics in common to create the experience of contemplative spaciousness."Any music with a generally slow, relaxing pace and space-creating imagery or atmospherics may be considered Space Music, without conventional rhythmic elements, while drawing from any number of traditional, ethnic, or modern styles." Lloyde Barde, July/August 2004, "When you listen to space and ambient music you are connecting with a tradition of contemplative sound experience whose roots are ancient and diverse. The genre spans historical, ethnic, and contemporary styles. In fact, almost any music with a slow pace and space-creating sound images could be called spacemusic." Stephen Hill, co-founder, Hearts of Space, What is spacemusic?
Sleep
Ambient has been selected by participants from online sleep surveys to aid sleep. The ambient music genre, among other genres, was used in a study pertaining to insomnia in adults, where it facilitated a large improvement in sleep quality for insomnia patients. Participants, who were between 20 and 45 years old, listened to Max Richter's album Sleep, which was originally meant to work as a sleep aid. They used headphones and were able to shut their eyes, but they were informed to stay in a sitting position so they do not fall asleep. Though one participant fell asleep whilst listening to the music.
Film soundtracks
Examples of films with Film score that feature some, or extensive, usage of ambient music include, Forbidden Planet (1956), Solaris (1972), Blade Runner (1982), Dune (1984), 10 Best Ambient Movie Soundtracks by Lucy-Jo Finnighan from ScreenRant. October 31, 2021. Retrieved 31 March 2024. Heathers (1988), Akira (1988), Titanic (1997), ‘Titanic’ Soundtrack Making Its Own Waves Steve Morse, The Boston Globe. 20 February 1998. Retrieved 31 March 2024. Traffic (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Solaris (2002), The Passion of the Christ (2004), The Passion of the Christ James Southall from The Movie Wave. 29 March 2004. Retrieved 31 March 2024. Pride & Prejudice (2005), The Social Network (2010), Her (2013), Enemy (2013), Drive (2011), Interstellar (2014), Gone Girl (2014), The Revenant (2015), Columbus (2017), Mandy (2018), Review: The Mandy Experience at Revue Cinema Canculture. November 1, 2018. Retrieved 31 March 2024. Annihilation (2018), Ad Astra (2019), Chernobyl (2019) and Dune (2021), Masterfully MASSIVE: Hans Zimmer’s Multi-Dimensional Score for ‘Dune 2' Sound of Life. 11 March 2024. Retrieved 31 March 2024. among many others.
Notable ambient-music shows
See also
Notes
External links
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