Ambient (music)
| Ambient music | |
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| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early 1970s, United Kingdom |
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Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Ambient music is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. According to Brian Eno, one of its pioneers, "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
As a genre, it originated in the United Kingdom at a time when new sound-making devices were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer. Ambient developed in the 1970s from the experimental and synthesizer-oriented styles of the period. The work of Tangerine Dream, Cluster and composer Erik Satie, as well as the psychoacoustic soundscapes of Irv Teibel's Environments series, were all influences on the emergence of ambient. Brian Eno named and popularized ambient music in 1978 with his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The Orb and Aphex Twin gained commercial success with ambient tracks in the early 1990s. Ambient compositions are often quite lengthy, much longer than more popular, commercial forms of music.
Ambient had a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music. Eventually, ambient grew a cult following in the 1990s. By the early 1990s, artists such as Aphex Twin were being called ambient house, ambient techno, or "ambient" by the media. Genre offshoots include dark ambient, ambient house, ambient industrial, ambient dub, psybient, and ambient trance.
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