Music Beyond Airports : Appraising Ambient Music
- Submitting institution
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The University of Huddersfield
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- 43
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- University of Huddersfield Press
- ISBN
- 9781862181618
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This edited book is the first academic collection critiquing Ambient Music and arose from the Ambient@40 International Conference which Adkins chaired in February 2018 at the University of Huddersfield (https://ambientat40.wordpress.com/).
Adkins’s chapter is the first to explore the aesthetics of fragility, noise and atmosphere in Ambient Music. It draws together existing theoretical frameworks developed by musicologists and philosophers over the past decade or so and synthesises and expands on these to explore notions specific to ambient music. It provides a rigorous terminology with which to discuss Ambient Music that goes beyond the oft-used ignorable-as-it-is-interesting mantra first proposed by Brian Eno in the liner notes to Music for Airports(1978). It develops Nomi Epstein’s notions of fragility (originally pertaining to instrumental music), Toben Sangild’s tripartite consideration of noise (communication theory), and Gernot Böhme’s aesthetics of atmosphere (ecological philosophy). The purpose is to explore how these elements underpin our perception of Ambient Music as well as highlighting the sense of ‘doubt and uncertainty’ that Eno maintained differentiated this form of music from Muzak but which has not been discussed in existing literature. It discusses a broad range of repertoire not previously analysed within an academic context. Of Epstein’s ten categories of fragility, three are developed: material, structural and temporal, as well as proposing and expounding upon two new categories: technological and gestalt fragility. Similarly, the chapter expands upon Sangild’s second notion of noise – ‘communicative noise’– by proposing and illustrating noise as intention, noise as interruption, and noise as artefact in Ambient Music. The final part of the chapter utilises Böhme’s phenomenology of atmospheres to interrogate Eno’s concept of Ambient Music ‘as atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint’. This suggests new modes of understanding and perceiving Ambient Music and in so doing asserts its relevance as a contemporary genre.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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