Ambient Music : Investigating spatial music as sounding architecture

”Ambient Music”, established and described by its ”creator” Brian Eno, has become a term with a wide range of uses - as generative music, in sound- and audiovisual art installation, a mediated ”sound” of a genre through albums and artists to plug in to during your daily walk - as well as any imaginable association with the term connected to public, spatial or virtual ambience. Through the liner notes of the genres original albums (Ambient 1: Music For Airports of 1978, and to some extent Discreet Music of 1975) it is clear though that the original idea is more related to listening to your own spatial awareness as a form of music rather than a following of certain sounds and conventions that the term has been associated with. At the time as a sonic alternative to conventional background music of public spaces. The author suggests that these ideas never would have surfaced if it wasn’t for the earlier ideas of Erik Satie and John Cage, whose sonic frameworks and instructions beyond the traditional music sheet were vital for Eno to create generative canvases of sounding art for the spaces. The paper then focuses on consolidating the term ”Ambient Music” with its frameworks in art and function by deconstructing it between spatial, architectonic usage and as a mediated genre of a ”sound”, via virtual generative music - and back again, via its original description of enhancing environments ”acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies”. With Eno’s original thesis in mind the paper continues to explore where ”Ambient Music” (through arguably its sub-genre, ”Spatial Music”) is today, as well as looking at the potential futures for the genres’ artistic functions as an established and accepted sonic element of physical architecture and public spaces. This exemplified by building a bridge between ”Ambient Music” and the modern ”non-ambient” sonic scenographer, ”Spatial Music”-artist Mareike Dobewall, for further discussions on sound art as sounding architecture - a potential future for the Ambient label.