Ambient music puts tone, texture and atmosphere ahead of melody, rhythm and song structure. Pieces often unfold slowly through layered synthesisers, sustained drones, gentle repetition and sometimes natural sounds, and they are meant to work both for attentive listening and as part of a room’s background.
The term was coined by Brian Eno in the mid-1970s. His Discreet Music (1975) was conceived to be played very quietly, and in the sleeve notes of Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) he described music that could reward close attention yet remain easy to ignore, explicitly setting it apart from canned background music such as Muzak. Erik Satie’s furniture music, written between 1917 and 1923, is usually cited as a forerunner. From the late 1980s ambient fed into ambient house and the chill-out rooms of club culture. Lo-fi borrows ambient’s sense of space, and its sparsest pieces suit quiet tasks such as editing or reading.