What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

Discreet Synthesizer Allowing new ambient music to emerge through composition on semi-modular synths

<p>Defining ambient music through exploring the intentions, creative processes and listening objectives of ambient composers. Aspects that have influenced ambient music, loops, drones, environmental sound, aural architecture<br></p>

Discreet Synthesizer Allowing new ambient music to emerge through composition on semi-modular synths

<p>Defining ambient music through exploring the intentions, creative processes and listening objectives of ambient composers. Aspects that have influenced ambient music, loops, drones, environmental sound, aural architecture<br></p>

Instrumental Ambient Music and Musical Entertainment in Sri Lankan Tourism

This research explores how instrumental music has been used as ambient music in selected popular tourist places in Sri Lanka. The domain of the study is confined within the coastal areas in Western Province where tourism is active at present. The places of catering, fast food, and various eateries and drinks have facilitated certain ambient music which is mostly chosen purposefully to attract and to entertain the guests. There must be a certain joint feature of opinions among food entertainers on matching food taste with instrumental music. The main purpose of this study is to explore how Sri Lankan food entertainers facilitate instrumental music to attract and to entertain their guests while consuming food and other attractions. Under the given circumstances of fading large scale tourist business, local business is still flourishing. The choice of entertainment might have been changed. Also, many online possibilities were created by using ambient music. All these current changes need to be considered while analysing collected material. This short-term research is seeking answers to the following questions: How are tourist demands assessed? Who is involved in decision-making about the repertoire, presentation, and arrangement? How is quality output controlled? Which kind of feedback from various participants (audience/ musicians/ organizers) may lead to corrections? The main method is interviewing and surveying. The surveys have to be carefully created and they have to include basic elements about formal and informal music education, peer behavior, and expectations of supervising companies or institutions.

Why Is(n’t) Ambient so White?

This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations of ambient music, a popular (sub)genre of electronic music and style of EDM, within anglophone EDM scenes and media discourses. It explores how early discourses on ambient implicitly shaped the genre’s aesthetics around idealizations of hip highbrow and high-middlebrow white masculinity. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, these discourses tacitly disregarded the relevance of genres racialized as non-white to ambient’s ideals of aesthetic experimentation, affective detachment, cerebral introspection, and physical ease. EDM-oriented discourses reified the putative whiteness of this formation in the early 1990s by repeatedly attaching the ambient label to the expressions of white men while describing the music, by way of a racialized and gendered mind-body binary, as the “beatless” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illuminates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical production and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author proposes that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assumptions about music and race without dismissing them.

The Influence of Embedded Music on the Memorization of Mandarin Chinese

The purpose of this study is to determine how embedded music affects verbal memory in the language of Mandarin Chinese. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted where 40 college students were recruited as the participants. Specifically, they were first randomly allocated into four groups, namely the ‘Reading Group’, the ‘Ambient-music Group’, the ‘Embedded-music Group’, and the ‘Finger-tapping Group’. They were then tested for verbal recall of a lyric in terms of both short-term memory and long-term memory. The results showed that the ‘Ambient-music Group’ scored the highest, followed by the ‘Reading Group’, while the ‘Finger-tapping Group’ ranked the third, and the ‘Embedded-music Group’ was at the bottom. The results that the sung version of a lyric was recalled worse than the spoken version conforms to the recent findings, as compared with traditional notions that music can facilitate the memory of language.

SHAPING ENVIRONMENTS CONDUCIVE TO EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING FOR ELDERLY PEOPLE WITH INCIPIENT COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

Undoubtedly, the environment and the set of environmental factors that surround us can have a great influence on the perceived sense of well-being. However, there are few studies that analyze, jointly, the influence of a selection of factors for the conformation of environments that favor well-being, especially oriented to elderly people with cognitive impairment. It is in this context that the present study arises, with the aim of determining the influence of a set of ten factors (ambient temperature, lighting, ambient music, etc.) on the emotional well-being of elderly people with early symptoms of cognitive impairment, which is particularly important in today's increasingly aging society, where the gradual development of cognitive impairment is inevitable. For this purpose, the advances achieved in previous research carried out by the authors are summarized, and a method based on the execution of a set of experiments is described, using collections of images to assess the emotional interpretation of each individual under the influence of different combination of simulated conditions (selected external factors) in their environment, processing and analyzing the data obtained by means of machine learning techniques. The realization of these experiments and the application of the proposed analysis method will allow obtaining knowledge that can be used for the design of specific living environments for elderly people with cognitive impairment where the sense of emotional well-being and the preservation of their mental faculties are favored. Key words: Emotional interpretation, environmental factors, Soft Computing, clustering, advanced age.

Pacifica Radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space and the Ambient Sound of California’s New Age

Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio from 1973, set forth an expansive transgeneric vision of contemplative atmospheric “space music” whose properties, in the following decades, would become more popularly codified as either “new age” or “ambient.” Histories of these latter genres typically separate out ambient’s avant-garde lineage and secular functionalism from new age’s therapeutic and spiritual concerns; but an examination of Hearts’s first decade on the air, leading up to its 1983 syndication via National Public Radio’s satellite network, reveals a sonic and cultural milieu that belies this eventual generic split. Through investigation of Hearts’s private archive and interviews with the program’s host Stephen Hill, as well as industry research, cultural-historical study, and style analysis, I situate the genesis of Hearts’s proto-ambient sound within the Bay Area’s new age movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Informed by the metaphor of the global media environment established in systems theory and popularized by Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand, artists and media producers within this grassroots technoculture designed and spread “alternative” personal media for the development of holistic awareness. These media included slow, reverberant, hypnotic recorded music, as curated by Hill and his cohost Anna Turner under the guiding concept of “space music.” This early history and analysis of Hearts’s space music as an atmospheric medium for attuning the listening self to a worldwide media ecology deepens and complicates genealogies that isolate the formation of ambient music from that of new age, revealing a cross-pollination of highbrow and countercultural ideals that led many musicians associated with the new age movement to similar sonic conclusions to those of ambient music architect Brian Eno.