Ambient music

Ambient music is a genre built around tone and atmosphere, setting aside traditional rhythm, composition, and melody in favor of layered textures. It often sounds calm and can be enjoyed through either passive or active listening, promoting a sense of peace or reflection. The music tends to feel atmospheric, visual, or unobtrusive, sometimes incorporating nature soundscapes or sustained, repeated notes similar to drone music. Synthesizers are frequently used to emulate instruments like piano, strings, and flute, giving it a connection to new-age music.

The genre took shape in the 1960s and 1970s as new instruments, especially the synthesizer, became more widely available. Its roots go back to earlier experiments: Erik Satie’s “furniture music,” which was meant to blend into the background of daily life; musique concrète, which manipulated recorded natural sounds; minimal music, with its repetitive patterns and drones; Jamaican dub music; and German electronic music. The term “ambient” was coined and popularized by British musician Brian Eno with his 1978 album *Ambient 1: Music for Airports*. Eno described the music as needing to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Early pioneers in the style included Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos, and Kraftwerk. The genre saw a revival in the late 1980s alongside house and techno, and by the 1990s it had developed a cult following.

Ambient music has never achieved major commercial success, but it has gained steady acclaim, especially in the Internet age. Its open structure allows it to draw from many other genres, including classical, avant-garde, experimental, folk, jazz, and world music.

**History**

In the early 20th century, French composer Erik Satie created what he called “furniture music” (Musique d'ameublement), a Dadaist-inspired form of background music. He intended it to be played during dinners, blending into the environment rather than commanding attention. Satie described it as music that would become part of the noise of the surroundings, softening sounds like knives and forks without dominating them, filling silences between friends, and neutralizing street noise.

In 1948, French composer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer coined the term *musique concrète*. This experimental style used recordings of natural sounds that were modified and manipulated to create compositions. Schaeffer’s use of tape loops and splicing is seen as a precursor to modern sampling.

In 1952, John Cage released his composition *4'33"*, a three-movement piece consisting of complete silence. The performance was meant to capture the ambient sounds of the venue, making them the music itself. Cage was cited as an influence by Brian Eno and other seminal artists.

**1960s**

During the 1960s, many music groups experimented with unusual methods, leading to what would later be called ambient music. In the summer of 1962, composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which served as both an electronic music studio and concert venue. Other composers working with tape recorders, including Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, contributed to the development of minimal music, which shares ambient music’s repetitive patterns, steady drones, and consonant harmony.

Between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s, many records in Europe and the United States established the conventions of ambient music in the English-language popular market. Examples from the 1960s 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 in Irv Teibel’s *Environments* series.

In the late 1960s, French composer Éliane Radigue created pieces by processing tape loops from the feedback between two tape recorders and a microphone. In the 1970s, she continued this approach using an ARP 2500 synthesizer, and her long, slow compositions are often compared to drone music. In 1969, the group COUM Transmissions performed sonic experiments in British art schools. Pearls Before Swine’s 1968 album *Balaklava* included sounds of birdsong and ocean noise, which later became common tropes in ambient music.

**1970s**

Ambient music developed further in the 1970s, growing out of the experimental and synthesizer-oriented styles of the era. Between 1974 and 1976, American composer Laurie Spiegel created *The Expanding Universe* on a computer-analog hybrid system called GROOVE. In 1977, her composition *Music of the Spheres* was included on the Voyager 1 and 2 Golden Record.

In April 1975, Suzanne Ciani performed twice on her Buchla synthesizer—once at the WBAI Free Music Store and once at Phil Niblock’s loft. These performances were released in 2016 on an archival album titled *Buchla Concerts 1975*. According to the record label, the concerts were part live presentation, part grant application, and part educational demonstration.

It was not until Brian Eno’s work that the genre was formally named and widely recognized.