What Is Ambient Music?

Originally defined as music which surrounds the listener with a sense of spaciousness and depth, and blends with as well as recreates sounds from the listener’s environment, Ambient today is used to describe a variety of musical styles. Most of those ambient sub-styles can be derived from popular styles such as techno, trance, and world-beat pop music. Although all of those sub-styles contain musical elements from Ambient such as foreground and background textures and sounds which give the music a certain surrounding quality and depth......

In the literature about Ambient as well as in the titles of several compilation albums of ambient pieces (for example the album Ambient 2: Imaginary Landscapes from the series A Brief History of Ambient on Virgin Records) one frequently finds the words imaginary landscape and sonic landscape. 

Music has the key to unlock new visions in the same way that a dream which eludes us when we try to remember its details may be re-triggered unexpectedly in an unfocused moment. As Brian’s songwriting fell away, so the space was filled by sonic landscapes, evocations of meteorology, natural forms and their transitional states. 

But the expression imaginary landscape in Ambient music has even a more musically concrete significance: one characteristic of Ambient that can be found in every Ambient piece is that the music creates a landscape of sound around the listener. This landscape fills out the whole space in which the music is listened to and seems to completely surround the listener.  The main musical devices used to create this landscape are:

Environmental sounds: Although the use of environmental sounds alone does not epitomize Ambient music, the use of environmental sound samples can be found in many ambient pieces . These sounds help 
create a sonic environment around the listener, which will merge with 
the listener’s real environment into an entirely new "soundscape".

 Ambient is:

a type of music that can create an atmosphere, environment 
and space, and at the same time does not oppress itself onto 
the listener. "Good Ambient" music will create it’s own little room and invite you in. It creates the idea that one can exist within 
the music rather than be limited to just focusing on it, unlike 
most popular forms that demand one sits up and takes notice 
or dances to it.

One of the most common misconceptions and confusions about today’s ambient style is that Ambient is too often associated with the music emerging from the rave and techno scene. What clearly distinguishes real Ambient from the other genres, is that Ambient is a style which is mainly centered around experimentation with entirely new sound textures and timbres.  Ambient music is stripped down of these idioms, and creates its beauty through the slow and gradual unfolding of changes in texture and color.  listener chooses to really "listen" to the music.

excerpts from a paper by Nick Weich

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