Whether you consider it a pleasant filler for a hotel lobby, something to kill the awkward silences at a tragic dinner party or the central focus for transcendental meditation, ambient music has a place in all of our lives. By its very nature, ambient is a highly accessible form of music, given that it can slip by undetected or lather your afflicted mind into a nourishing sleep. Quite the opposite can be said for genres like death metal and hardcore punk.
Musicologists and journalists like to put labels on things, such as Elvis Presley, The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll or Iggy Pop, The Godfather of Punk. Such labels are perhaps less common in ambient music, but if anyone deserves such a title, it’s Brian Eno. He could be a king or a prince, but I’ll go with ‘The Godfather of Ambient’ and leave ‘Prince’ to his younger disciple, Aphex Twin. However, I might add that this label would sell the producer short, given his influential work in other realms of electronic music.
Eno is our ‘Godfather of Ambient’ because he is among the original innovators of ambient music as we know it today and, crucially, the man who first coined the term. In the mid-1970s, when he released his classical-inspired ambient album Discreet Music, Eno defined the tranquil medium as a soundscape “intended to induce calm and a space to think.” He added, “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Following Discreet Music, Eno continued his foundational work in ambient production with highly influential releases like Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. His ambient catalogue, companion to high-profile productional collaborations and his early work with Roxy Music, is hugely influential. However, Eno wasn’t technically the first ambient musician.
If we’re being pedantic, ambient music can be traced back to prehistory, where tribes around the globe enjoyed gentle, repetitive music to accompany various communal gatherings, religious ceremonies and psychedelic experiences. But good luck trying to find a name for one of these “songs”, let alone a recording.
If we fast-forward to the more tangible ages of recorded music, one might describe various recordings of Indian classical and drone music as ambient adjacent. Still, ambient music as we know it today is defined by the involvement of electronic production tools, such as the synthesiser and the recording of ambient sounds. Working within these parameters, we often consider American composer Raymond Scott the first to plant a flag in the ambient soundscape while creating his 1962 album Soothing Sounds For Baby.
Soothing Sounds For Baby is a three-volume set of electronic ambient music initially intended, as the title betrays, to lull infants to sleep. Released in collaboration with the Gesell Institute of Human Development, Scott devised the three volumes as appropriate for infants of three different age brackets: Volume 1 for one to six months, Volume 2 for six to 12 months, and Volume 3 for 12 to 18 months. At 18 months old, your baby is ready to proceed to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II with your doctor’s permission.
Soothing Sounds for Baby predates Discreet Music by 13 years, during which other early ambient works like Tony Scott’s 1964 album, Music For Zen Meditation, Irv Teibel’s Environments, Éliane Radigue’s Vice-Versa and Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe emerged from influences in classical and drone.