What is 'ambient music'?
Ok, so I was asked to cover this subject on my weekly broadcast, but completely failed to do so due to one reason or another, so I'll publish it here instead (gives me time to think about things and edit them accordingly, whether thats now or much later).
What IS ambient music? well, what colour is grass? There are so many colours and varieties that it would be impossible to go through them all, but as a generalisation, I personally see ambient music as being music that one can listen to as just a little higher in volume than normal background noise. Ambient music is not the kind of bouncy boingy 'thud thud thud thud' of other music. For me, ambient music is the sort of thing you can listen to when you want to relax with something that isn't the regular standard of usual. Ambient has a relaxed tempo - I mean, come on, anything like heavy metal going at 400bpm isn't exactly 'chill out' is it?
Ambient music can be anything.. the sound of the washing machine or the recorded sound of the washing machine having gone through several processes to make it sound something like vaguely musical.
tonally low sounds can have an ambient effect, the crackle of static on an electricity pylon (which scares the crap out of me but hey, it does sound kinda nice and I wish I could remember to take some recording gear out one of these nights...), the purr of a cat, the drone of the pc fan... yup, tonally low sounds DO have an ambient effect. I remember studying this kind of thing at college years ago when we were given a rough introduction to 'how sounds can affect and influence people'. That said, tonally higher noises, or sounds of a greater pitch than would be if regarded as ambient can have an opposite effect. Mixed in the right proportions, you can achieve good ambient music with a combination of tonally high and low sounds.
There's an irritant quality about some tonally higher sounds compared with tonally lower sounds, which I do think the commercial music world is all too aware of and uses to its advantage, hence the repetitive quality of some songs out there - it hides it well, but as someone who really gets irritated to the point of annoyance at some high pitched sounds, I hear it, and more so on the radio and in shops too where they make it impossible for you to ask the staff anything because they're deafened by the raucus din on the store amazingly bad hi-fi and it's series of badly positioned speakers and the fact that they don't want to admit to liking what they're hearing and can't be bothered dealing with you.
Anyway, back the subjec of what is ambient music.
I like ambient music. I like creating 'ambient pieces'.. there's something relaxing about it after racing about like a maniac recording an absolutely specific sound and then finally doing something with it. For me, the relaxing comes when I don't have to swear at soundclick.com and my stuff uploads first time without a hitch.
There are of course pioneers of ambient - without their influence on the world, we'd all probably be into trash metal by now and Britney Spears wouldn't be in the news as often or in the charts or whatever... Metallica would be gods of their genre along with Black Sabbath and all that. Synthesizers, sampling and ambient belong together. They're the three essentials ambient artists like myself hold dear. Well, along with a computer, internet connection and somewhere to dump..er.. hold our beloved music pieces.
Ambient drum and bass is another planet entirely, and one I visit often. It's not the harsh hard kind of full throttle electronic or the sublime relaxing 30 minutes of washing machine on spin cycle either. Its the wrong side of the right side of ambient for me, it's like the bad boy of the washing cycle where a sock gets lost. But its' mostly good. I tend to think of ambient d&b as being the same as plain ol' ambient, but it's just a little beefier - all the spin cycle and a few muted drum loops.
Ok, so I'm doing a lot of 'use of the washing machine' here - so what! This is MY reflection on things!
I do however draw the line at noise. Noise is noise. Unless it has a purpose, its got no intentions at all. There's no build up, no dramatic middle bit and the end tends to fade out leaving you wonder why you spent 40 minutes listening to it.
HOWEVER.. 40 minutes of noise thats been cleverly edited to sound like something else and have some kind of plan (like, an intro, a middle and a decent end) isn't all that bad and has to make you feel like you've been listening to it for only 4 minutes.
And thats another thing. Some short tracks sound longer than they are and some long tracks sound shorter - it's one reason why I do my show every week by playing longer and longer tracks as the show goes on - it's all psychological. You'll remember the shorter ones as the longer ones are playing and a couple of hours later, you'll remember the longer ones as though they only played for a couple of minutes. Try it, you'll see that I'm right!
So anyway dear reader, there we conclude this weeks dive into the world of ambient. Next week, 'Cliff Richard - just WHO is his plastic surgeon?'
What IS ambient music? well, what colour is grass? There are so many colours and varieties that it would be impossible to go through them all, but as a generalisation, I personally see ambient music as being music that one can listen to as just a little higher in volume than normal background noise. Ambient music is not the kind of bouncy boingy 'thud thud thud thud' of other music. For me, ambient music is the sort of thing you can listen to when you want to relax with something that isn't the regular standard of usual. Ambient has a relaxed tempo - I mean, come on, anything like heavy metal going at 400bpm isn't exactly 'chill out' is it?
Ambient music can be anything.. the sound of the washing machine or the recorded sound of the washing machine having gone through several processes to make it sound something like vaguely musical.
tonally low sounds can have an ambient effect, the crackle of static on an electricity pylon (which scares the crap out of me but hey, it does sound kinda nice and I wish I could remember to take some recording gear out one of these nights...), the purr of a cat, the drone of the pc fan... yup, tonally low sounds DO have an ambient effect. I remember studying this kind of thing at college years ago when we were given a rough introduction to 'how sounds can affect and influence people'. That said, tonally higher noises, or sounds of a greater pitch than would be if regarded as ambient can have an opposite effect. Mixed in the right proportions, you can achieve good ambient music with a combination of tonally high and low sounds.
There's an irritant quality about some tonally higher sounds compared with tonally lower sounds, which I do think the commercial music world is all too aware of and uses to its advantage, hence the repetitive quality of some songs out there - it hides it well, but as someone who really gets irritated to the point of annoyance at some high pitched sounds, I hear it, and more so on the radio and in shops too where they make it impossible for you to ask the staff anything because they're deafened by the raucus din on the store amazingly bad hi-fi and it's series of badly positioned speakers and the fact that they don't want to admit to liking what they're hearing and can't be bothered dealing with you.
Anyway, back the subjec of what is ambient music.
I like ambient music. I like creating 'ambient pieces'.. there's something relaxing about it after racing about like a maniac recording an absolutely specific sound and then finally doing something with it. For me, the relaxing comes when I don't have to swear at soundclick.com and my stuff uploads first time without a hitch.
There are of course pioneers of ambient - without their influence on the world, we'd all probably be into trash metal by now and Britney Spears wouldn't be in the news as often or in the charts or whatever... Metallica would be gods of their genre along with Black Sabbath and all that. Synthesizers, sampling and ambient belong together. They're the three essentials ambient artists like myself hold dear. Well, along with a computer, internet connection and somewhere to dump..er.. hold our beloved music pieces.
Ambient drum and bass is another planet entirely, and one I visit often. It's not the harsh hard kind of full throttle electronic or the sublime relaxing 30 minutes of washing machine on spin cycle either. Its the wrong side of the right side of ambient for me, it's like the bad boy of the washing cycle where a sock gets lost. But its' mostly good. I tend to think of ambient d&b as being the same as plain ol' ambient, but it's just a little beefier - all the spin cycle and a few muted drum loops.
Ok, so I'm doing a lot of 'use of the washing machine' here - so what! This is MY reflection on things!
I do however draw the line at noise. Noise is noise. Unless it has a purpose, its got no intentions at all. There's no build up, no dramatic middle bit and the end tends to fade out leaving you wonder why you spent 40 minutes listening to it.
HOWEVER.. 40 minutes of noise thats been cleverly edited to sound like something else and have some kind of plan (like, an intro, a middle and a decent end) isn't all that bad and has to make you feel like you've been listening to it for only 4 minutes.
And thats another thing. Some short tracks sound longer than they are and some long tracks sound shorter - it's one reason why I do my show every week by playing longer and longer tracks as the show goes on - it's all psychological. You'll remember the shorter ones as the longer ones are playing and a couple of hours later, you'll remember the longer ones as though they only played for a couple of minutes. Try it, you'll see that I'm right!
So anyway dear reader, there we conclude this weeks dive into the world of ambient. Next week, 'Cliff Richard - just WHO is his plastic surgeon?'
posted by Audio Coffee Productions at Sunday, October 09, 2005
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