Thoughts on Ambient Music Part 3: Space Ambient
Let´s determine in what Space Ambient is different from Dark Ambient.
If you prefer watching a complete practical project of making Space Ambient you will surely like this video:
When the idea of making this book was in its early stages, but nevertheless kept haunting my mind, I gave a group of three of my private students the task to describe the musical relation between Dark Ambient and Space Ambient. In our next week´s meeting they had come up with the following (shortened to its essentials):
“Take Dark Ambient, replace clashing dissonant intervals and chords with more moderate ones, leave away all harsh and edgy sound FX as well as all noises which consists of high amplitude high frequency spectra and fill the gaps with mellow only very slowly evolving soundscapes.”
I couldn´t help laughing, sent these students back home to think it over again and to bring me a more profound solution the week after.
But when I thought it over myself in the evening I suddenly found it a bit less insufficient (still “poor” though), and tried to find out, why my otherwise rather good students had had such trouble finding a good answer.
Well, I think their – and not only their – problem was (and partly still is) the fact, that Space Ambient and Dark Ambient don´t have the same roots, are children of rather different musical “parents”, and – in case of Space Music – children of more parents than is the Sub-Genre of Dark Ambient. I´d like to say, that Space Ambient (or “Space Music” or, or,or...) wasn´t at all Ambient Music at the beginning, but has developed into something that can be called “ambient”, a development that can be located somewhere in the later 1970s. Therefore, in the following I will only consider space music styles from around 1976 on and later.
Let´s keep it practical. Needless to say that Space Ambient has undergone quite a huge development from Tangerine dream´s “Phaedra” in 1974 to Robert Rich´s “Somnium” in 2001 and Moby´s “Calm.Sleep” in 2016 – just to name a view.
But it is possible to set up – if not rules, so at least some – basic principles of Space Ambient:
1. calmingly slow melodic and harmonic developments
2. massive – but creative – use of reverb, delay and echo effects, sometimes changing their intensity over the duration of a long held note or chord.
3. application of minimalistic techniques and principles
4. if there are eerie passages in a piece, then they are rather mysterious than dark
In my book “Making Ambient Music With Cherry Audio Synths and Effects” there are 2 complete projects of making Space Ambient, step-by-step explained.
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.
… to be continued
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