Radical Ambient Music

Radical Ambient Music is a compilation created by fellow Toneburster T. Jervell. It explores Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music.

According to Eno, Ambient music is:
• Environmental music
• Music as ambience
• Intended to enhance environments acoustic and atmospheric
idiosyncrasies
• Intended to induce calm and a space to think.
• Must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention
without enforcing one in particular
• Must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Participants were required to make a composition based on an environment, without any directly recorded sounds from that space being present in the final recording. I chose to record a small trail near Gowen, Michigan.

I processed the recording in Max 8 using a series of window comparators triggered by different sections of the frequency spectrum. These then controlled the sonic events, thus satisfying the requirement of having no part of the recording in the final soundscape.