AI overview
Ambient music is a genre designed to create a background atmosphere or mood rather than command your full attention, with soft textures and minimal changes that blend into your surroundings. It has become widely used in everyday settings like restaurants, stores, and workspaces, as well as in meditation and relaxation, making it an influential genre that shapes how we experience sound in daily life.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Stylistic origins
- Background music beautiful music drone dub easy listening electronic experimental impressionist ( furniture ) krautrock kosmische musik light music minimal
- Cultural origins
- 1960s–70s, Jamaica ( dub music ) , Japan and United Kingdom
- Derivative forms
- Biomusic chill-out downtempo IDM new age post-rock space music trance trip hop
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Often "peaceful" sounding and lacking composition, beat, and/or structured melody, ambient music uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening, and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre evokes an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and some works use sustained or repeated notes, as in drone music. Bearing elements associated with new-age music, instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
The genre originated in the 1960s and 1970s, when new musical instruments were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer. It was presaged by Erik Satie's furniture music and styles such as musique concrète, minimal music, Jamaican dub music and German electronic music, but was prominently named and popularized by British musician Brian Eno in 1978 with his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports; Eno opined that ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting", however, in early years, there were artists that were pioneers in this genre, like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk, etc. It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, growing a cult following by the 1990s.