Ambient: Cultures of Listening and Ways of Using Sound (Piotr Kędziora)
The book “Ambient: Cultures of Listening and Ways of Using Sound” explores ambient both as a musical genre and as a category for describing cultural listening practices. The author analyzes the work of Brian Eno, as well as the historical sources of ambient music—from Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement and the idea of gebrauchsmusik developed by Heinrich Besseler, to John Cage’s experiments and the development of Japanese kankyō ongaku as spatial music. He also discusses the relationship between ambient and minimalism, new age, space music, and its commercial variants, such as Muzak, easy listening, and elevator music.
Ambient is devoted to the theoretical and historical context of ambient music. The author analyzes how thinking about music and listening has changed—from medieval theories of musical effects, through musicology, psychology, and sociology of music, to cybernetics and contemporary sound studies. He also considers, among other things, the concept of environmental listening, referring to R. Murray Schafer’s theory of soundscape and Robert Fink’s category of repetitive listening.
The author also focuses on the conditions of ambient possibility, exploring the acousmatic experience, musicking, and the influence of technology on sound perception. He analyzes musical habitus and listening patterns in the context of the social functions of sound. Ambient music appears here as music that depends not only on form, but also on the manner of reception—defined by zero-level listening, or egalitarian quasi-listening focused on the sound environment and blurring the boundaries between music and the audiosphere of everyday life.
In summary, the author argues that ambient is not only a musical genre, but a new way of thinking about music and listening. His analysis presents it as a phenomenon that transcends traditional aesthetic categories – as music that redefines the relationship between sound, space, and social listening practices. The book provides tools for understanding music-culture in the context of the contemporary soundscape and is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand, from a historical and theoretical perspective, the contemporary, turbulent ecosystem of ubiquitous listening and music delivered by recommendation systems.
Ambient: Cultures of Listening and Ways of Using Sound: publisher’s website
