Download Free Ambient Instrumental Music

This tradition in western music can be traced back to classical composers, for example JS Bach and Chopin. However, it was Erik Satie who was the first to express the idea of music specifically as background sound, for example at social gatherings, where its role was to create an ambience, rather than exist as the focus of attention. Satie did not believe that such music was inferior, rather that it simply fulfilled a different function.

I believe there is a natural progression from Chopin through Satie to the works of Bill Evans and other jazz musicians in the 20th century, and later to minimalist contemporary composers like Phillip Glass. In this way, the category of ambient music was in emergence well before Brian Eno and others formalised it in the 1970s.

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This recent piece (and accompanying video) supports this view and gives a useful insight into the mechanisms by which the subtle and spacious sounds of ambient music may reduce anxiety. Eno himself has gone on to explore the therapeutic potential of ambient music within some interesting projects.

Ambient music moved into the modern era mainly in the form of electronica, through the work of pioneers such as Aphex Twin. However, its influence has also spilled over into other genres such as hip-hop, indie rock and folk.This excellent collaboration from Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita (who play at the Barbican soon) could perhaps be classified as ambient world music. I find the connection between West African and Cuban music to be fascinating, and this is a fine example.

I thought I would conclude this piece by adding a playlist for our readers and listeners to enjoy. Hopefully somewhere in the coming weeks, it might provide a starting point for anyone looking to turn to ambient music for relaxation and dealing with everyday anxiety, or at least aid some of our followers on a stressful commute home!

A final note for now is to mention that I am continuing to try to broaden the scope of the blog, to incorporate a wider selection of musical styles, and people from different backgrounds. Women, and those from outside of the UK and Ireland, remain underrepresented here, despite my efforts to include.

The role of hip-hop in mental health has been well covered by HipHop Psych, but I would love to hear from anyone with an interest in music from outside the western tradition, such as traditional African and Asian music. As ever, I am open to suggestions on any matters related to music and mental health.

I've been getting into more ambient and instrumental music, stuff that really creates a mood, like Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner and David Bowie's Low. Specifically this.

I don't really know how to go about creating this type of music. I know the first thing that comes in is a viola and there's probably some synth stuff underneath of it and there's some sax in there as well. That's the entirety of this record is synth, sax and viola. But it just sounds so otherworldly, it doesn't REALLY sound like viola, you know- I guess that's all due to the mixing of it.

I'm just a "traditional" musician- I play guitar, bass, keys, etc- but I'm trying to make all of this stuff on a computer, in Reason with virtual synths (studying FM synthesis and modulation), but I don't really know where to start or how to create this type of music that just kind of exists and hovers. I'd honestly love to invest in some hardware gear, but I don't know where to start.

Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody.[5] It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening[6] and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation.[7][8] The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual",[9] or "unobtrusive" quality.[10] Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.[11]

The genre originated in the 1960s and 1970s, when new musical instruments were being introduced to a wider market, such as the synthesizer.[12] It was presaged by Erik Satie's furniture music and styles such as musique concrte, minimal music, Jamaican dub reggae 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".[13] It saw a revival towards the late 1980s with the prominence of house and techno music, growing a cult following by the 1990s.[14] Ambient music may have elements of new-age music and drone music, as some works may use sustained or repeated notes.[15]

Ambient music did not achieve large commercial success, being criticized as everything from "dolled-up new age, [..] to boring and irrelevant technical noodling".[16] Nevertheless, it has attained a certain degree of acclaim throughout the years, especially in the Internet age. Due to its relatively open style, ambient music often takes influences from many other genres, ranging from classic, avant-garde music, experimental music, folk, jazz, and world music, amongst others.[17][18]

As an early 20th-century French composer, Erik Satie used such Dadaist-inspired explorations to create an early form of ambient/background music that he labeled "furniture music" (Musique d'ameublement). This he described as being the sort of music that could be played during a dinner to create a background atmosphere for that activity, rather than serving as the focus of attention.[19]

In his own words, Satie sought to create "a music...which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need."[20][21]

According to a 1998 article in The Wire, Blind Willie Johnson's 1928 single "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" could be filed under ambient music, deeming it "a piece of country gospel improvisation, slide guitar with vocal hums and moans, but no lyrics."[22]

In 1948, French composer & engineer, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrte. This experimental style of music used recordings of natural sounds that were then modified, manipulated or effected to create a composition.[23] Shaeffer's techniques of using tape loops and splicing are considered to be the precursor to modern day sampling.

In 1952, John Cage released his famous three-movement composition[24] 4'33 which is a performance of complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is intended to capture the ambient sounds of the venue/location of the performance and have that be the music played.[25] Cage has been cited by seminal artists such as Brian Eno as influence.[25]

In the summer of 1962, composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick founded The San Francisco Tape Music Center which functioned both as an electronic music studio and concert venue.[26] Other composers working with tape recorders became members and collaborators including Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Their compositions, among others, contributed to the development of minimal music (also called minimalism), which shares many similar concepts to ambient music such as repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, and consonant harmony.[27]

Many records were released in Europe and the United States of America between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s that established the conventions of the ambient genre in the anglophone popular music market.[28] Some 1960s records with ambient elements include Music for Yoga Meditation and Other Joys and Music for Zen Meditation by Tony Scott, Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott, and the first record of the Environments album series by Irv Teibel.

In the late 1960s, French composer liane Radigue composed several pieces by processing tape loops from the feedback between two tape recorders and a microphone.[29] In the 1970s, she then went on to compose similar music almost exclusively with an ARP 2500 synthesiser, and her long, slow compositions have often been compared to drone music.[30][31] In 1969, the group COUM Transmissions were performing sonic experiments in British art schools.[32] Pearls Before Swine's 1968 album Balaklava features the sounds of birdsong and ocean noise, which were to become tropes of ambient music.[22]

However, it was not until Brian Eno coined the term in the mid-70s that ambient music was defined as a genre. Eno went on to record 1975's Discreet Music with this in mind, suggesting that it be listened to at "comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility",[20] referring to Satie's quote about his musique d'ameublement.[37]

Other contemporaneous musicians creating ambient-style music at the time included Jamaican dub musicians such as King Tubby,[2] Japanese electronic music composers such as Isao Tomita[3][4] and Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as the psychoacoustic soundscapes of Irv Teibel's Environments series, and German experimental bands such as Popol Vuh, Cluster, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream. Mike Orme of Stylus Magazine describes the work of Berlin school musicians as "laying the groundwork" for ambient.[38]

The impact the rise of the synthesizer in modern music had on ambient as a genre cannot be overstated; as Ralf Hutter of early electronic pioneers Kraftwerk said in a 1977 Billboard interview: "Electronics is beyond nations and colors...with electronics everything is possible. The only limit is with the composer".[39] The Yellow Magic Orchestra developed a distinct style of ambient electronic music that would later be developed into ambient house music.[40] e24fc04721