Brian Eno's Airport and Music You Don't Have to Listen To

The sentence

Here is the whole line, as Wikipedia quotes it from the album's notes: "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."

I had seen the second half quoted many times. The first half is the part that changed how I think about my own app: "without enforcing one in particular". The music doesn't get to decide how closely you listen. You do.

What annoyed him

According to Wikipedia, Eno spent several hours waiting for a flight at Cologne Bonn Airport, "becoming annoyed by its uninspired atmosphere", and came up with the idea of music designed for airports. The album was meant as an alternative to canned background music of the Muzak kind. Wikipedia dates its release to February 1979.

The same article says the music was "intended to induce calm and a space to think". I like that as a job description for a sound.

Why "ignorable" is not an insult

Background sound usually fails in one of two ways.

• Interesting, and impossible to ignore. A song you love has words, a beat and a tune. It keeps asking for your attention. I wrote about that in why music doesn't help you focus.
• Easy to ignore, and empty. Lift music, or a short loop. There is nothing to hear when you do listen, and after a while you start noticing the loop. That one is in why lo-fi stops working.

Eno's sentence asks for a sound that fails neither way. That is harder than it looks. The usual tools for making music interesting are a hook, a build and a surprise, and those are the same things that grab your attention.

How the album does it

Wikipedia describes the record as "four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths". Single notes were sung by three singers and played on piano, recorded, and then turned into loops.

As I understand it, the trick is in the differing lengths. Each loop comes round at its own pace, so the notes keep meeting in new combinations. Nothing new is ever added, and it still doesn't settle into a pattern you can learn.

So the interest comes from a few gentle things slowly lining up in different ways. Nothing happens, in the usual sense. That kind of interest doesn't grab at you.

How I use the sentence

I didn't know this line when I started building. I only knew that I can't work in silence, and that music and podcasts pull my attention away. When I found it, it gave me two questions to ask about my own app.

1. Can I forget it's on?
2. If I stop and listen, is there something there?

The first I can answer. I have worked with it running for hours. The second I can't judge fairly, because I built it and I know where every sound comes from. You can.

My app is no tape machine. Shapes drift around the screen and sound happens where they overlap. But it leans on the same idea: a small set of gentle sounds, each moving at its own pace, meeting in combinations nobody wrote down.

Before Eno

The idea of music as part of the room is older. The composer Erik Satie called it "furniture music", a term Wikipedia dates to 1917. The longer story, from Satie to phone apps, is in a short history of generative ambient music.

Sources

• Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Wikipedia
• Furniture music, Wikipedia