There Is No Such Thing As "Ambient Music"

Thought on Ambient Music  part 1

Does Ambient Music even exist? Is Ambient Music real? … or is it just another of these marketing terms?

What do a 19 year old table dancer and my grandma (born long before World War I) in common? Well, they both are women.

This riddle and its solution leads us to the question: “What at all is ambient music?”.  

Let´s start at the "beginning" (= when the term got a public one). 

When we look at– well, listen to – Eno´s first ambient productions mounting in the famous “Music for Airports” album, and then follow its work until today, then we see, that there´s a lot of thought going into the work, partly rather abstract and theory based (not music theory in its classic meaning though), up to real coding (e.g. in Ableton and MAX).

We discover principles of minimal music combined with approaches which we use when producing generative music (see my two trilogies about making generative music: https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/bookshop-list).

 

And looking at, and listening to, the jungle of different productions of today´s, which either call themselves “ambient music”, or are called that way by music journalists and “experts”, we won´t find it surprising that Eno ones said he wouldn´t even recognise ambient music any more.

Some other aspects which are attributed to ambient music are “unobtrusive”, “peaceful”, “without distinct rhythms”, “adapted to a specific environment”.

But we find “classic” four-on-the-flour beats in productions running under the label “Ambient House”. We find harsh industrial sounds and noises in so called “Ambient Industrial”. We find intimidating sonic incidents in “Drone Ambient” and “Dark Ambient”.

And I ask myself, to what specific environment “Acid Ambient” is adapted in an unobtrusive way.

Ahh, I´ll probably have to emphasise something:

I LOVE ALL OF THESE SUB-GENRES OF AMBIENT MUSIC.

But, once again, with all of these different music productions which are running under the “ambient” label: has the term “ambient” become meaningless?

“Ambient” means encircling, environmental or circumfluent. “Ambience” is synonymous to “surroundings” and “vicinity”. But what does e.g. Ambient Techno surround? In what is e.g. Acid Ambient circumfluent, what does it encircle more than e.g. Beethoven´s Symphony no. 9 “encircles” the audience in a concert hall?

Some call ambient music an “open style”. If this means there are no distinct criteria, no more or less clear characteristics, which “encircle” all kinds of ambient music, then the term has become meaningless indeed.

 

OK, we have long since abandoned the expectation that the name of a musical genre says something true about the nature of that genre.

Yes, ambient music has undergone quite a development since it was first called “ambient” in the 1970s. During this development ambient music has generated numerous sub-genres (I´ve found 15 so far).

But can these products of diversification still rightfully be called “ambient music”?

Is it really the case, that early ambient music has developed and split into different musical species, or is it the term “ambient” itself that has split and diversified, has been stretched and thinned out into – vacuity?

In my e-book “Making Ambient Music With Cherry Audio Synths and Effects” I show that all these critical (or anxious?) questions are legitimate, but they all have positive answers.

See https://www.dev.rofilm-media.net/node/672 you don´t have to use exactly those Cherry Audio synths which I´m using in a project. You don´t even have to use Cherry Audio synths at all to follow my steps – but it makes things easier if you use the synths and timbres of my examples when you want to reproduce each of the following chapters step by step.

I prove – there and in the included projects, as well as in the following articles here on my website - that all of the named sub-genres wear the term “ambient” rightly, and that it is possible to follow their existence back to the ambient music of the beginning (I´ve chosen to walk the route in the opposite direction from an “ambient stem cell” up to the diverse ambient sub-genres).

 

A last note: even productions like “Music for Airports” didn´t just suddenly fall out of the sky, but are products of developments from even earlier musical roots. But this makes the topic for another book.

 

… to be continued

click here to read part 2

click here to read part 3