Ambience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Lysaker
Keyword(s):  
Background Music ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
Ambient Music ◽  
Living Environments

Chapter 4 explores and theorizes Eno’s approach to ambient music. It begins with a clear precursor, Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement—furniture music. Like Satie, Eno sought sounds that could blend into and color various situations without commanding the attention of the hearer. But he also wanted music that could engage listeners who elect to attend to the activity of the assembled sounds, which distances it from other background music like Muzak. Because “ambient” has exploded into a diverse musical genre, Music for Airports is contrasted with other ambient works from the like of Aphex Twin, Moby, Gas, and Thomas Köner. What seems to distinguish Music for Airports is its ability to elicit our attention without captivating it through musical developments. Instead, it initiates a kind of reverie, opening spaces for thought in ordinary living environments.

Muzyka na peryferiach uwagi. Od "musique d’ameublement" do audiomarketingu

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylwia Makomaska
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Basic Research ◽  
Background Music ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Ambient Music ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Empirical Approaches ◽  
Insight Into

The book is an attempt to obtain the interdisciplinary insight into the musical culture of the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of "acoustic wallpaper". The author indicates the connections between functional concepts, in which background music is an instrument of social influence (Muzak and audiomarketing), and artistic concepts (Erik Satie and musique d'ameublement, Brian Eno and ambient music) intended to create a neutral background filling the public space. She deals with the issues of acoustic engineering in the public space, combining three basic research perspectives: musicological, psychological and marketing, taking into account theoretical, historical and empirical approaches.

Triple Entendre

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hervé Vanel
Keyword(s):  
Musical Performance ◽  
Background Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Ambient Music ◽  
And Performance

This book discusses the rise and spread of background music in contexts as diverse as office workplaces, shopping malls, and musical performance. The book examines background music in several guises, including Erik Satie's “Furniture Music” of the late 1910s and early 1920s, which first demonstrated the idea of a music not meant to be listened to, and the Muzak Corporation's commercialized ambient music that became a predominant feature of modern life in the 1940s. Different kinds of music were developed to encourage or incite greater productivity in the workplace, more energetic shopping, or more animated socializing. The book's discussion culminates in the creative response of the composer John Cage to the pervasiveness and power of background music in contemporary society. Cage neither opposed nor rejected Muzak, but literally answered its challenge by formulating a parallel concept. Forty years after Satie presented his work to general critical puzzlement, Cage saw how background music could be combined with mid-century technology and theories of art and performance to create a participatory soundscape on a scale that Satie could not have envisioned, reconfiguring the listener's stance to music. By examining the subterranean connections existing between these three formulations of a singular idea, this book analyzes and challenges the crucial boundary that separates an artistic concept from its actual implementation in life.

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