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How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

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Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#2

Post by chaosprint »

This is a really well-written article and the experience on the website is great.

It looks that the audio files are downloadable from the source file.

So I downloaded 3 mp3 files from the website, drag-drop them into the glicol web ide (https://glicol.org/tour#samples), and write the following music code:

// you need to drag eno_mfa_choir_01.mp3 here \/ and the same for the rest

~t1: speed 0.3 >> seq 60 >> sp \eno_mfa_choir_01 >> lpf 500 1.0 >> mul ~mod1

~mod1: sin 0.1 >> add 1 >> mul 0.1

~t2: speed 0.5 >> seq 72 >> sp \eno_mfa_choir_02 >> lpf 600 1.0 >> mul ~mod2

~mod2: sin 0.2 >> delayms 100 >> add 1 >> mul 0.3 >> mul ~mod3

~t3: speed 0.5 >> seq 67 >> sp \eno_mfa_choir_03 >> lpf 3000 1.0 >> mul ~mod3

~mod3: sin 0.3 >> add 1 >> mul 0.2

o: mix ~t.. >> plate 0.1

// by changing the numbers you get lots of variations.

// hope this helps you understand better how this form of music is made

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#3

Post by WilTimSon »

The details still escape me as I feel like I read the words but didn't get the meaning, which is by no means a knock on the write-up, I'm just a complete fool when it comes to musical technology and recording.

However, it is a delightfully formatted experience and I spent several minutes playing with the randomize buttons on the site. Don't think any of the resulting mixes sounded bad, but Eno's original is, of course, unmatched. Would be interesting to see something similar for more traditional genres, where a song is picked apart and you can then randomize its bits and see if anything beautiful comes out.

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#4

Post by petercooper »

WilTimSon wrote: post #3

The details still escape me as I feel like I read the words but didn't get the meaning, which is by no means a knock on the write-up, I'm just a complete fool when it comes to musical technology and recording. However, it is a delightfully formatted experience and I spent several minutes playing with the randomize buttons on the site. Don't think any of the resulting mixes sounded bad, but Eno's original is, of cours…

It's a quite different experience to a Web page, but if you want to play with messing about with music without becoming a musician as such, https://sonic-pi.net/ is absolutely fantastic as you can manipulate samples and sounds using a Ruby-like language. For example, this sort of fiddling: https://youtu.be/DdtcMf9YI7s?t=508

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#5

Post by danwills »

Very enjoyable information and resources! Loved it! Thanks for posting.

I collaborated on recent years on a track that we think of as being 'ambient'. The video for it went on my YouTube recently, first time providing my own sounds with visuals! Proud of that milestone! Here's a link:

https://youtu.be/WNAzrOBqpsY

Eno is definitely one of my absolute heroes and such an inspiration! Ambient 4 'On Land', by Eno in my opinion is an absolute masterpiece, that really does sound like natural environments while still being musical, I listen to it a lot.

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#6

Post by chalst »

WilTimSon wrote: post #3

The details still escape me as I feel like I read the words but didn't get the meaning, which is by no means a knock on the write-up, I'm just a complete fool when it comes to musical technology and recording. However, it is a delightfully formatted experience and I spent several minutes playing with the randomize buttons on the site. Don't think any of the resulting mixes sounded bad, but Eno's original is, of cours…

There used to be quite a thing for randomised conpositions in the Baroque era and later, called Musikalisches Würfelspiel.

There was also a thing around tape cut-ups in the 1950s, with William Burroughs being very into this stuff, with David Bowie later picking some of this stuff up. It was more about deconstructing expectations than creating something beautiful, but some of the material is very interesting.

For the first, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspi...

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#8

Post by achairapart »

WilTimSon wrote: post #3

The details still escape me as I feel like I read the words but didn't get the meaning, which is by no means a knock on the write-up, I'm just a complete fool when it comes to musical technology and recording. However, it is a delightfully formatted experience and I spent several minutes playing with the randomize buttons on the site. Don't think any of the resulting mixes sounded bad, but Eno's original is, of cours…

Music is about tempo and sync. In fact, nowadays you can throw anything into a modern DAW software and it will instantly sync everything for you.

Eno instead put randomness/chaos at play by using tape loops of different length, so they will never (or very hardly) repeat at the same interval again, or, in his own words:

    What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again.
Think of a series of little music boxes with each a different tune and length, you start playing one a time in random order, and the whole epiphany is that you expect chaos and dissonance but instead you still got an organic and nice harmony. And that's the basics of generative music, in the most simple words I can find.

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#9

Post by candiddevmike »

Anyone have some other ambient works similar to Eno's? Preferably something more landscapey like music for airports or Apollo.

Some of my favorites include Stars of the Lid, Eluvium, Robin Guthrie (So Many Short Years Ago), Brian McBride (Overture for other halfs), and Helios.

Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)

#10

Post by swayvil »

candiddevmike wrote: post #9

Anyone have some other ambient works similar to Eno's? Preferably something more landscapey like music for airports or Apollo. Some of my favorites include Stars of the Lid, Eluvium, Robin Guthrie (So Many Short Years Ago), Brian McBride (Overture for other halfs), and Helios.

Tycho.

Eno's experimental ambient collab with Fripp is maybe a bit heavy.

Some of M83

Lots of Boards of Canada might fit

Explore Am Boy and Teen Daze

Clocolan

maybe Lorn

Sarin Sunday

try Freescha, but it's kinda depressing

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