Musical Instruments
Ambient music
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". Other pioneers in this genre include Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos, and Kraftwerk. It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, and had a cult following by the 1990s. Ambient music has not achieved large commercial success. Nevertheless, it has attained a certain degree of acclaim throughout the years, especially in the Internet age. With its relatively open style, ambient music often takes influences from a wide range of genres, including classical, avant-garde music, experimental music, folk, jazz, and world music.
Also on this shelf
Contrabass recorder.
Balaban (instrument).
See also
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