The issue is the application of music to social and cultural situations in which music, "as we know it", is not optimal. This is always the case when music demands the listener's full attention, and, though it is less intrusive when it simply invites attention, it may still become a distraction.
Reading, thinking, conversation, and things of this nature do not benefit from distractions, and sound developed and expressed for these scenarios must be conducive to being relaxed, yet alert.
Brian Eno's ambient music develops rarefied musical events to evoke this stage of consciousness; I have been developing, over the past decade, a means to a singular, and to the extent possible, an over-arching, non-musical, atmospheric and environment effect with disparate implications.
To paraphrase Poe, it is a total effect designed as a singular, overarching expression, suitable for the aforementioned occasions, and for the expansion of consciousness. Yet, as I have since verified in academic practice, it has additional, peculiar effects, such as allowing, thus increasing, individual focus of attention on other activities, and providing extended relief from such challenges as ADHD.
While not intentional, this is nonetheless a proven fact, verified by objective results, and a welcome artistic development, with possible applications to PTSD as well. This necessitates continuing experimentation, study, and review.
Invention and discovery demand trial, assessment, and verification.
Experimentation allows risk, while the introduction of something entirely new, for an entirely new purpose, requires caution.
Terms must be defined, understanding assured, before experience becomes clear, as it will in the course of the coming creative dynamic and presentation. To listen will be to hear with new ears.
We are all familiar with the common sounds of music, with the genres, and the "artists". Do not be fooled. There is always more to discover, but there is the unknown, and risk, to consider.
Envision nuance and pattern. These are auguries of direction, movement, and meaning.
Awareness becomes intensified, and more direct, encompassing a broader spectrum of perceptual reality. In terms of auditory sensitivity, listener, artist, and composer share aesthetic interest and purpose. But this is an abstract proposition, and only as good as it yields concrete experience in listening that is subjectively enjoyable for some, and objectively so for others.
Regardless, "music culture" and its adherents cannot dictate direction to that which is not music.
Nor are those whose sensibilities are essentially stupid and banal expected to grasp its virtues.
Situational awareness involves more than knowledge of the state of circumstances.
Of equal, if not greater, importance is the locus of perception. This center of awareness may expand to an elevated set of impressions of the surrounding environment, extending to the auditory as well as the visual and other senses. This is simply to say that the more that is known, the more that can be known in terms of consciousness and creativity, particularly as applied to problem-solving, whether concrete or abstract in nature.
The artist and composer will do well to actively see, and to listen, and to envision in such a manner.
Listen, and hear, becoming aware of the preponderance of musical artifacts.
This is the consequence of a long standing, selective process of exclusion of musical artists from the commercial cultural setting, specifically in the pursuit of extravagant political agendas.
Music culture must evolve naturally, because manipulation of musical culture destroys it.
I am, in fact, promoting an aesthetic concept and concrete idea of sound that is not music.
It is, of course, sound designed with an entirely different purpose than that of music, and one which frees, rather than dominates, the listener's consciousness, with none of the emotional manipulation that is expected of "musical entertainment".
It is the type of concept commonly viewed as "disruptive".
There is a difference between daybreak and twilight.
To generate representations of environments requires transformation and conversion.
The composer must, through myriad means, transform perceptual imagery into sound, and convert the impressions of the senses, particularly the visual and tactile, as well as the auditory, into authentic arrangements of imaginative sound. And what composer and listener hear must be complete in evocative experience.
Ambient music is, first and foremost, music. It follows various musical paradigms.
"Ambience" is its strength, that being its atmospheric and environmental qualities. Its weakness is predictability: one anticipates its development in musical terms. Most listeners may find this to be agreeable, yet those with little interest in the style will likely find the experience boring, or less than adequate to their attention.
My interest as a composer of these works lies in the ambience, not in the "music"
I am in opposition to predictability, thus one who utilizes musical elements for purposes "other than the musical". The object is to create aural metaphor, which is to say, representations of non-musical, atmospheric events as they exist in non-manipulated environments, whether natural or artificially constructed. An illustration of the former, "natural" sound is the composition The Celestial Way, reflecting Yángshuò, China; the latter, or "man-made" sonic atmosphere may be heard in Night Traffic in Open Secrets, reflecting the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai.
The perceiver tends to become acclimated to environmental sounds, take them for granted, ignore them, and lose perception of them.
While there are numerous paradigms and methods for developing sound compositions, my interest is in manipulating artificial sounds with the goal of reconnecting the perceiver to the continuum of the sonic environment, at all times, anywhere and everywhere.
Perceive sound beyond the senses, through the imagination.
By doing so, heighten the awareness for those sounds that may be perceived. This requires conscious effort, thus a degree of difficulty few will attempt or sustain.
The rewards, nonetheless, for the composer, are commensurate with the task. Some might suggest these perceptions attain to the borders of the paranormal, and this may not necessarily be a false or misguided perspective.
It is never the burden of the artist to accept or address cultural failure.
The failure of a culture to thrive and progress is a collective failure, with collective causes, not the failure of the individual. When the consequences of ignorance are groupthink result in the inability to distinguish objective reality from subjective appearances, cultural perspectives are devalued and degraded.
One may as well expect a stone to applaud the subtleties and dynamics of authentic artistic expression. And the artist will not waste time seeking such things.
To evoke atmospheres, the composer must minimize the subjective.
The result, in the final expression, is a sense of vibration and the engagement of perception with as little interference, or influence of personal dynamic, as possible.
Look, it cannot be seen; listen, it cannot be heard.
Only the artist understands. And this is the penalty paid by those cultures who demand creativity they will not support because they cannot comprehend that which transcends the mundane.
Subjective emotion is not reality, as the wretched, apparently, would require others to believe.
Examples are so plentiful as to be ubiquitous, and are found in every contemporary arena. There is no greater evil in expression, artistic or otherwise, than that which uses the truth to bear false witness.
Ideological expression is no more than a political statement, and politics is the death of art.
Artistic expression related to politics is nothing unless it involves the world that is larger than mere politics. What is called "political awareness" is facile abstraction in the greater context of human consciousness and experience. It is a pathway, and a small part of a pathway, toward a higher view of reality. And it is at a far, far distance from any summit.
The reader will have noted the cultural pretense that "the arts" are of essential importance.
This is nothing more than a sham perpetuated by academic, political, and cultural interests The arts have been suppressed and manipulated in service to illiberal agendas for over a half-century, and this is the current state of affairs. For the artist there is only knowledge and the capacity to act, if freedom to do so becomes possible.
Consciousness expands, engaging reality and sensory awareness. This is understanding separate and distinct from the social, cultural, and political abstractions that encompass daily pursuits.
This is experience revealed in elevated expression.
To the nihilist, there is no purpose or reason, thus there is no judgement.
The artist is explorer and discoverer. The concerns of the artist are no different, and culturally, worthless opinions are nothing new, and indeed, nothing at all.
Many find "ambient music" desirable as a retreat from the stresses of contemporary life.
This is worthwhile as a beginning of understanding. Plainly, we are conditioned to certain ideas that produce expectations of life and our place within it. We expect "intensity" and it is expected of us. We expect "extremes" and believe them to be "normal" within the scheme of things. But this is a kind of programming that is deleterious to elevated states of being and consciousness.
It is necessary to discern what stresses in our experience lead us to clearly appreciate the cultural expressions that directly oppose them. Gaining a fundamental sense of such things, rather than ignoring them in a specious "quest for authenticity", makes perceptual change permanent, rather than simply possible.
No individuality? No art. There can be no tolerance for any such scenario.
Art is impossible in any collectivist setting. There, find no more than propaganda. This is the totalitarian groupthink that led to the destruction of both the music and motion picture industries.
And certainly this is an ideological perspective, one of personal and creative freedom.
Act without restraint. Work outside the cultural and social norms.
Mediocrity will not be tolerated, and its artificially prolonged effects will be short lived. What follows then is the decision of the artist, and no one else.
