Ambient culture: coping musically with the environment (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ambient Music as Popular Genre: Historiography, Interpretation, Critique
Ph.D Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2015
In September 1978, Brian Eno coined the term “Ambient music” to describe a type of audio recording designed to create atmosphere. Ambient music, he proposed, should foster calm while registering doubt, and accommodate various different levels of listening attention. Since Eno’s proposal, Ambient music has become a genre of drone- and loop-based electronic music within the popular music market. This dissertation examines several key recordings in the formation of the Ambient genre of popular music, with focus on releases from the U.S. and England between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through music analyses of these recordings, as well as media analyses of their promotional rhetoric, this dissertation traces the sonic tropes and social practices discursively organized by the “Ambient” label. It describes how Ambient music serves users as a means of relaxing, regulating mood, and fostering an atmosphere or sense of place. Unlike most extant accounts of the genre, it also explores how Ambient recordings reflect aesthetically upon their instrumentality through musical techniques, metaphors, and moods. A survey of approximately one-hundred Ambient listeners rounds out the study, illuminating from a present-day perspective how reception practices relate to the production and interpretation of Ambient recordings. Chapters 1 and 3 examine two proto-Ambient recordings from the Environments series of nature sound LPs (Atlantic, 1969–78), released by Syntonic Research, Inc. These analyses elucidate the aesthetics and technological uses that since consolidated Ambient music as a genre, and describe shifting attitudes toward consumer technology in the Western environmental and countercultural movements. Chapter 2 compares and contrasts Environments with recordings from the concurrently emerging Acoustic Ecology movement. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate various artistic and conceptual practices that informed Brian Eno’s conception of Ambient music. Chapter 4 identifies precedents for Eno’s concept in the experimental avant-garde music of Erik Satie, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Chapter 5 analyzes the title recording on Eno’s Discreet Music album (Obscure, 1975), placing its production in the context of 1960s and ‘70s English minimalism, as well as the research field of cybernetics. It concludes with a media analysis of the record as a consumer product, illustrating how the elimination of authorial intention in experimental composition and cybernetics translates into popular art. Chapters 6 and 7 outline Ambient music’s explicit emergence as a term in the popular music market. Chapter 6 examines Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (Editions E.G., 1978) through a comparative analysis with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (Soma Quality Recordings, 2010), illuminating the relevance of Ambient music’s contexts of consumption to interpretation. It concludes with a brief reading of Eno’s On Land (Editions E.G., 1982), which cemented Ambient music’s significance within private, individualized reception. Chapter 7 concludes the study with an overview of various recordings by The Orb, KLF, Mixmaster Morris, and Pete Namlook in the “ambient house” subgenre of electronic dance music, illustrating their connections with the aesthetic themes and promotional discourses of earlier Ambient recordings. I am happy to share a PDF with anyone interested in reading. Feel free to email me at vszabo@virginia.edu.
Ambient@40 - Nõ Music for Abandoned Airports (The Stupefied Landscape…It's Fake, But It Works)
Nõ Music for Abandoned Airports (The Stupefied Landscape…It's Fake, But It Works), 2018
Nõ Music for Abandoned Airports (The Stupefied Landscape…It's Fake, But It Works) The basic premise of this paper is to briefly speculate on a philosophical paradox concerning Brian Eno’s use of the word ambient in relation to his compositional work between 1975 and 1982 and indeed, what ambient has come to mean in a broader cultural sense in 2018. To begin with, three important definitions of the word are considered for this argument: 1) Etymologic 2) Historical 3) Philosophical 1) The Latin root of ambient, ambire (to surround, which in turn has the possible interpretation: to dominate), is discussed with particular reference to Eno’s thoughts in 1978 that ‘Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think’ (therefore implying that very specific listening codes were designed by the composer which, in light of his previous statements regarding the relinquishment of compositional authorship, suggests elements of not-so-subtle listener coercion). 2) Music For Airports is identified as an example of ‘monocratic’ composition (one that blurs, yet subtly reinforces borders) within an historical timeline beginning in 1975 (the birth of Eno’s Ambient experiments) and re-examined in the light of its various ‘spin-off’ genres, such as New Age and Trance and its possible descendants, The Disintegration Loops (William Basinski) and The Departing of a Dream (Loren Conners). Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (also 1975) is considered as a parallel (albeit unintended) Ambient experiment and identified as a ‘mutable’ composition (one that annihilates borders). 3) The broader implications of ambient are addressed with explicit reference to Tim Morton’s paper Why Ambient Poetics. Whereas Eno’s definition is constrained, concentrated upon a blurring of spheres (psychological, architectural etc.) and an imposed sensuousness generated by compositional parameters that appear to have no need of discourse…beyond its reach even; Morton’s rationale is centered upon the notion of ambient as a fluid (smearing) critique of the post-human condition and its relationship to deep ecology and environmental suffering, wherein nothing is fixed and nothing obscured. Therefore, applying Morton’s hypotheses of unrest to Ambient composition, as opposed to acting as a ‘soothing panacea for capitalist and technocratic alienation’, it can engender an acute awareness and acceptance of the unpredictable nature of mankind and its surroundings and thus possibly diminish our hierarchical relationship towards the environment, instead of intensifying it.
Fragility, noise, and atmosphere in ambient music
University of Huddersfield Press eBooks, 2019
This chapter will examine how contemporary experimental ambient music engages with notions of fragility, the aesthetics of atmosphere, and the use of noise to engender a more active listening experience than that proposed by Brian Eno in 1978. 1 Although rather at odds with the generally accepted innocuous nature of ambient music-one that "tints" the environment-I propose that, through engaging with these concepts, composers can encourage different ways of listening to and thinking about ambient music, as well as reintroducing the sense of "doubt and uncertainty" 2 that Eno originally ascribed to ambient music. In doing so, I mean to demonstrate that ambient music is far from being a contemporary comfort blanket to block out the perceived problems, or overwhelming influx of information, in society but is a genre that, at its best, can offer a reflection of contemporary culture and thought. In order to do this, I will present a framework for discussing ambient music, drawing on, and developing Nomi Epstein's notions of fragility, Torben Sangild's tripartite consideration of noise and Gernot Böhme's aesthetics of atmosphere. 'Ambient' Music An ambience is defined as atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint […] Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all
PULSE: The Journal of Science and Culture , 2022
This article contributes a media ecological approach towards relevant topics within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical AI studies concerning cybernetics, the boundaries of consciousness, neural plasticity, and sensorial awareness, by way of discussing soundscapes produced in the ambient music genre. I will discuss the ways in which the ambient music framework provides potentialities of psychologically entering multimedia realms, (non)physical realms, and realms of altered states of consciousness, which creates creatives spaces of/for increased possibilities of/for the mind(s). I will examine the producer, visual (light) artist, and musician Brian Eno. I will argue that Eno’s artistic philosophy and approach to the ambient music genre consists of a generative cybernetic scaffolding, within which he builds his ambient worlds and soundscapes, providing expanded non-physical spatialities that often explore possibilities of sensorial affect and perceptions of the self, increase potentialities for individual neural plasticity, and heighten cybernetic ecoconsciousness. I will thus explore the ways in which Eno’s ambient audiovisual media, abstract aural architectures or soundscapes, and meditations on cybernetic environmentalism allow for non-narrative psychological emancipation from the formalism imposed on the ‘self’ in everyday lifestyle and technoculture. Consequently, Eno’s ambient, subconscious awareness confronts viewers with contemporary and future usages and values linked to a) expanded edges and/or boundaries of synaesthesia; b) neural plasticity and notions of ‘self;’ and c) cybernetic questions concerning the human-machine relationship to collectivity, shared environments, and eco-consciousness.
Participation and creation: towards an ecological understanding of musical creativity
La Deleuziana , 2019
This paper draws on artistic explorations of territorial and spatial forces through analysis of projects set in the natural landscape, in a specific indoor site or at the threshold between the two. Specific attention is given to the artistic processes at play in the transformation of materials cre-ated/collected in the natural environment when shaped for presentation in an indoor location. What is the relation between being and becoming in this liminal space? According to Erwin Straus, the impetus to this process is the pathic moment of sensation, a moment which evolves in two dimensions: as an unfolding of the world and of the self (Straus 1965). Louis Schreel argues that in Deleuze and Guattari, artistic practice activates a process in which «the work 'captures' forces at work in the world and renders these sensible. Its effects are above all real and not merely imaginary: the image is not a mental given but a concrete, existing reality» (Schreel 2014: 100). Here, Deleuze distinguishes between the percept-landscape in the absence of man-and affect, the non-human becomings contained in the artwork. This paper wishes to unpack these processes through a study of two concrete instances of artistic practice, aiming to create immediate interaction between musician and environment, in which either of the two authors took part.
Toward an ecological aesthetics: music as emergence
In this article we intend to suggest some ecological based principles to support the possibility of develop an ecological aesthetics. We consider that an ecological aesthetics is founded in concepts as "direct perception", "acquisition of affordances and invariants", "embodied embedded perception" and so on. Here we will purpose that can be possible explain especially soundscape music perception in terms of direct perception, working with perception of first hand (in a Gibsonian sense). We will present notions as embedded sound, detection of sonic affordances and invariants, and at the end we purpose an experience with perception/action paradigm to make soundscape music as emergence of a self-organized system.
Megan Phipps: SOUNDSCAPES OF POSSIBLE MINDS: Meditational Cybernetics in Brian Eno's Ambient Music
Pulse, 2022
This article contributes a media ecological approach towards relevant topics within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical AI studies concerning cybernetics, the boundaries of consciousness, neural plasticity, and sensorial awareness, by way of discussing soundscapes produced in the ambient music genre. I will discuss the ways in which the ambient music framework provides potentialities of psychologically entering multimedia realms, (non)physical realms, and realms of altered states of consciousness, which creates creatives spaces of/for increased possibilities of/for the mind(s). I will examine the producer, visual (light) artist, and musician Brian Eno. I will argue that Eno's artistic philosophy and approach to the ambient music genre consists of a generative cybernetic scaffolding, within which he builds his ambient worlds and soundscapes, providing expanded non-physical spatialities that often explore possibilities of sensorial affect and perceptions 1 Megan Phipps is a Lecturer in New Media & Digital Culture and Research Assistant in Media Studies, Blending Learning, and Audiovisual Archives for CLARIAH Media Suite and CREATE (Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective) at the University of Amsterdam. of the self, increase potentialities for individual neural plasticity, and heighten cybernetic ecoconsciousness. I will thus explore the ways in which Eno's ambient audiovisual media, abstract aural architectures or soundscapes, and meditations on cybernetic environmentalism allow for non-narrative psychological emancipation from the formalism imposed on the 'self' in everyday lifestyle and technoculture. Consequently, Eno's ambient, subconscious awareness confronts viewers with contemporary and future usages and values linked to a) expanded edges and/or boundaries of synaesthesia; b) neural plasticity and notions of 'self;' and c) cybernetic questions concerning the human-machine relationship to collectivity, shared environments, and eco-consciousness.