A Short History of Generative Ambient Music

1917: music as furniture

The French composer Erik Satie came up with the term "furniture music" in 1917, according to Wikipedia. He meant music that is part of a room in the way a chair is.

In 1920 some of it was played during the interval of a play in Paris. Wikipedia says the audience was encouraged to go and look at an exhibition of drawings instead of sitting and listening. Music you are asked not to listen to was a strange idea then, and it didn't catch on.

1975: a record played too quietly

Brian Eno tells this story in the notes to his album Discreet Music. He was in bed after a car accident. A friend, Judy Nylon, brought him a record of eighteenth-century harp music. After she left he played it, by mistake, "almost inaudibly", with rain falling outside. He wrote that this "presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment".

The album's title piece runs for about half an hour. Wikipedia describes how it was made: two short melodies of different lengths, played by a synthesiser, sent through an echo and a pair of tape machines so that they layered over each other. Eno set it going and mostly left it alone. He called it "really automatic music".

The late 1970s: the airport

A few years later came Music for Airports, built by "layering tape loops of differing lengths". Its notes contain the line that defined the style: ambient music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting". Wikipedia calls it the first Eno album released under the label of ambient music.

I wrote about that one sentence, and how I test my own app against it, in Brian Eno's airport.

The 1990s: rules in software

Tape machines can only do so much. The next step was software. A British company called SSEYO built a program named Koan, which made music from rules as it went. According to Wikipedia it was released in 1994, Eno began working with it in 1995, and in 1996 he published Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software.

This is also where the name comes from. Eno used "generative music" for music that is "ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system".

2008: in your pocket

In October 2008 Eno and the musician and software designer Peter Chilvers released Bloom, a phone app. You tap the screen and each tap becomes a tone, shown as a circle. The app keeps the tones going and layers new ones over them.

And long before all of it

People built things that play themselves well before electricity. Wind chimes, harps played by the wind and a dice game for composing dances are in wind chimes, aeolian harps, and machines that play themselves.

Where my app fits

What has changed since Koan is mostly reach. That software needed a particular computer and setup. Today the same kind of thing runs in a browser tab, on a phone, with nothing to install.

My app is a small example. It has no tape loops and no written rule system. Shapes drift across the screen, each kind makes one kind of sound, and sound happens where they overlap. I'm not putting it next to Eno's work. I'm using an idea he and others made usable.

Sources

• Furniture music, Wikipedia
• Discreet Music, Wikipedia
• Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Wikipedia
• Generative music, Wikipedia
• Bloom (software), Wikipedia