I really like working to this kind of music. Is there anything out there in the internet that generates infinite Eno-style ambient music?
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)
#92This reminds me of "Zaireeka" by the Flaming Lips, an album that was sold as four separate CDs and you would have to cobble together every boombox, stereo, and Walkman in your house to try and play them all at the same time. So, you would hit the "play" button on disc #1, frantically try to match your timing with disc #2, inevitably be a few seconds late on disc #3, etc. The end result was that the music never sounde…
Other albums with the same idea: https://rateyourmusic.com/list/fidwell/synchronizing-albums/
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#93This is my goto music for helping getting calm and to sleep after bed time stories.
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#94The 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 c…
> Music is about tempo and sync. I
That's an exceptionally limited definition, and misses out so much music from around the world and throughout time.
It's also not even particularly reflective of how human musicians playing even "dance" music (which you'd think would be most exemplary of this definition) actual perform.
Eno's interest in what used to be called "process music" was very much of the era (some of the minimalists had similar interests), and they were much less about avoid avoiding particular characteristics of music as reinventing the compositional process.
Also, if the set of loops really are ill-suited for each other, you will get chaos and dissonace. A good part of the art of generative music (a phrase that has taken over from the 60s/70s "process music") comes from carefully selecting things that, despite their somewhat random relationships, nevertheless sound good (however you define that) when combined using some algorithm/mechanism. That's a non-trivial thing to do.
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
For another interesting musical experiment, listen to "Poème symphonique", a "composition" that basically sets up 100 metronomes, winds them up, sets them to random (I believe) speeds, and lets them play and wind down. It starts chaotic, until they eventually run out and form interesting rhythmical patterns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAYGJmYKrI4
Didn't know about that! But Steve Reich also did many experiments with musical repetitions; his compositions are supposed to be played live (not rely on machines) but they can also be set up in a DAW. "Piano Phase" is pretty easy to implement for example. Contrary to the quote by Eno in the article, Reich's loops are be "commensurable" -- after a certain point they repeat exactly. It seems that's what interests him:…
Reich's earliest experiments with what he terms "phasing" were done on (tape) machines. It was only after a few successful tape pieces that he began to wonder if humans could actual perform music composed around the same principle (they could!)
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#96Anyone 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.
This free stream:
various artist including Brian Eno. Listening to the bluemars stream now :)
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#97Anyone 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.
Music for Programming[0] is a nice site with mixes of music, most of it ambient, intended to provide focus while programming. Each mix has a setlist so you can follow along and perhaps find some new artists to explore.
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#98I really like working to this kind of music. Is there anything out there in the internet that generates infinite Eno-style ambient music?
https://www.flowful.app/
Can't promise Eno quality, but flowful claims something similar
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32149989
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Incidentally, Bowie would even do this with lyrics. He would write up lyrics or some phrases, then cut up words or combinations of words, and move them around. That’s why (I always thought), he lyrics gave off a common theme with really interesting and novel turns of phrase.
Bowie even came up with a software in the 90s called the Verbasizer to further automate his cut-ups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3IKLMgFaDA There is also a web app version at https://verbasizer.com/
Interesting. An associate of Burroughs, Ian Sommerville, wrote a program in the 1960s to permute lists of words to help Burroughs for similar reasons.
Re: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
#100In the early 90s I was flying through O'Hare and had to go through the famous neon-festooned Sky's the Limit installation. Very cool, but then I noticed they were playing "Music for Airports" at an airport and figured I had come full circle.
https://www.codaworx.com/projects/skys-the-limit-united-airl...