Ambient music

Ambient music emphasizes atmosphere and texture, often using sustained tones and gradual change instead of a prominent melody or beat.

Drone music: Music built from sustained tones or slowly changing sonorities. Its extended tones offer one of ambient music’s clearest ways to create a stable atmosphere.
Erik Satie: French composer whose spare piano works and concept of furniture music challenged conventional concert listening. His furniture music anticipated the idea that music could shape a setting without demanding close attention.
Music for Airports: A 1978 ambient composition by Brian Eno designed to alter the character of an airport environment. It is an early, explicit example of ambient music designed for a public space.
New-age music: A broad genre of soothing music associated with relaxation, meditation, and spiritual themes. It shares ambient music’s quiet textures but more often signals wellness or spiritual purpose.
Tape loop: A length of magnetic tape joined into a continuous loop that repeats recorded sound. Repeated fragments can turn small changes in recorded sound into a slowly unfolding texture.
musique concrète: A 20th-century practice of composing with recorded sounds and manipulating them as musical material. Its use of recorded sound helped establish techniques later adopted in ambient composition.
Background music: Music intended to accompany an activity or environment rather than command focused attention. Ambient music overlaps with background music but can also reward concentrated listening.
Downtempo: Electronic music with relaxed tempos and a prominent, usually subdued, rhythmic pulse. Its beat remains central even when its mood and production overlap with ambient music.
Field recording: An audio recording made outside a controlled studio, often capturing environmental sound. Environmental recordings supply ambient compositions with recognizable sounds and place-specific texture.
Electronic music: Music made or transformed with electronic instruments and sound-processing technology. Electronic instruments gave ambient composers sustained tones and timbres unavailable from many traditional instruments.

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