Authenticity

Insight reveals reality beyond appearances, in life and in the visual arts.

That same insight reveals false appearances as well.  So it is for the composer in creating and sustaining atmospheric effects through sound.  Falsified experience sounds forced, frenetic, or artificial in emotional content, tone, and mood, while genuinely immersive atmospheres evoke contemplative settings conducive to the expansion of consciousness.

Ambimusica.com

A Catalogue of Aural Auras

Art reveals a reality outside the ordinary.

Listen, and hear.

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Sources, Origins

Search memory, and aural impressions will reveal themselves.

These are unconscious sensory images, taken from the course of daily events and reaching back across the gulf of experience and consciousness to recognition of first and primal sound settings.

Some will call it impossible to realize such impressions in musical form.

The artist as composer will say music is not the sonic form by which these atmospheres may be brought into being.

Supersensory Impressions

Open the inner ear beyond the common and easily recognized sounds of the day.

As a consequence, expect to hear the extraordinary, what some might call the uncanny, even the paranormal.  These are sounds outside the spectrum of mundane experience.

Ear, Brain, Sound, Being

Failure to experience and develop the contemplative spirit is, in point of fact, debilitating.

Contemplation and reflection nurture the imagination, clarify ideas and emotional states, reinforce analytic thought and strengthen independent will.

For music to lend its force to such essential conditions of consciousness, it must be composed and produced in ways that focus on the arrangement of those elements of sound that contribute most to immersive, atmospheric environments, within which the mind is as liberated as the physical body can be while dancing or engaged in athletic activity.

The Depths Beneath the Surfaces

Perceptions must be more than the equivalent of a cursory glance, a brief awareness.

Hearing, one absorbs atmospheres; listening, one interprets and understands.  These are different levels of consciousness than those of moving to rhythms and nodding to beats.

But the way of the sounds, and of their intent, must be different as well.

Anywhere

Settings dominated by noise hinder clarity of perspective, jarring the most even-tempered nature.

It is not necessary or desirable to shut out the world; what is prudent and essential is to restore and sustain a sense of balance and equanimity in one's life and surroundings.

This process, too, is an art.

Distances Emerge

Listening can provide a change of consciousness in ways similar to that of a journey or dream.

One leaves nothing behind, in any event, but perspectives may alter, and changes in tone, focus and perceptivity may bring about greater understanding and deeper, broader appreciation for what is real.

This is not escape, but immersion in equanimity and balance of reason and feeling.

Unknown Appearances

Hear what is not there.

Limited to expectations of listening experience, the imagination and perceptions constrict and stultify.

Discern, out of the ubiquitous familiar, those sounds that cannot be identified, remaining uncanny and out of reach. These are seeds of creative gesture, challenging artistic representation.

Setting, Space, Movement, Being

Hear the world.

Thought moves through language, then beyond words, as sounds move beyond music.

Remote Sounds in Landscapes and Interiors

Causes in time past unfold now in events yet to be.

Sense the aural character of the moment in motion, trace its origins, hear its approaching outcomes.

This may not be music, but something uncanny; familiar, yet unknown.

Sound Forms in Motion

Things rise and fall, gather together, disperse, and reform as diverse elements come and go, bringing about changing atmospheres and conditions.

Listening perception in environmental or spatial contexts suggests arrangements of aural forms and events according to a different order than those structured in musical terms, reflecting separate and distinct aspects of beauty and interest as well.

Imagery and Mind

Verbal and sonic imagery contribute to cultural vocabulary.

Words and phrases are replete with associations, as are sounds and tone qualities of sounds.

Storm and roar, blood and thunder, the cool silences, whispering desert winds, murmuring waters, echoes of nightfall.  Context delivers cliche or evokes archetype, and accordingly both listener and composer contribute perceptions that illuminate effect and meaning.

Ultima Thule

The sounds of urban environments tend toward the metallic, electronic, strident, pale, and brightly reflective.  Street, shop window, old brick and new concrete, restaurant, business, hiss of elevators, radio night air traffic.

Suburbs bring voices, automobile society, games, radio and television, air conditioning thrum, floor plan, patio, murmuring landscapes constructed for pleasure and altered by weather conditions.

Rural sounds flow with wind, wood, water, and wildlife.  But there is asphalt, railroad, shopping center, institution, home and garden.  And, like the cities and their environs, the sounds of cultural order and disorder-- intellectual and emotional, physical and spiritual, social and personal.

But even yet there are sounds at a distance to all human contact, beyond society, media, and culture --unimagined geographies, uncanny and otherworldly.  The real challenge is to perceive, discover and bring these atmospheres into being.

Music and the Uncanny

Sounds may be designed to evoke the simultaneously familiar and the unknown.

These atypical arrangements of sounds, with their elements of emergence, clustering, dispersal and re-forming, may challenge reason, and so provoke uncertainty, or a sense of strangeness, even given their simple, everyday nature as tones and musical patterns.

They may, at first, be easily rejected, rather than given intellectual consideration and analysis with the aim of aesthetic appreciation, but the curious listener will follow the threads of the familiar until absorbed by a new-- or different-- perception of music.

Aural Metaphor

Sound is scenario, vista, substance, environment, idea, soul.

Book of hours, spirit of avenues, temptation of whirlpool, canyon rim, skyscraper.  Flock of wild geese, motorcade, hunting camp, epiphany in darkling cold, dust devil across dry wash, rainbow and moon with drifting contrails.

Conversation, nervous and soothing.  Crackling fire.  Echoes down mountainsides.  Light moving through cafe at midday.  Flood of foreign voices, riptide of foresight, tributaries merging into the deltas of mind.

Wave to Mind

Sense impressions conducive to ordering or unifying states of consciousness, emotional outlook, and conditions of mind and being may be conveyed in tone language.

Through sound, the composer always directs the force of auditory imagery to make impressions upon the listener.  To create impressions of a direct yet transcendent nature intended to elevate consciousness, however, it is incumbent upon the designer to attend to the progress of the works as one would in ordering a landscape, garden or park.

The effects are meant to be reflective of  nature and the human perspective, and so experienced by the listener internally as well as in the surrounding ambient atmosphere.  

Impermanence

Acclimate to sounds not meant to be grasped, to music not subject to being internalized?

All things are different today than they were yesterday, and they will be different tomorrow.  As all things return to their source and find different forms, ultimately to grow and change, decline and rise once more, so the sounds of life come and go in all ways, and perspectives change.

Painting became nonrepresentational, film and literature, nonlinear, before once again flowing, as do all the arts, in diverse directions. Music changes, as does culture, with listeners, and listening as well.

Passages

Auditory perception functions on primary and secondary levels of awareness.

Consider the nature of listening as active, and primary, and hearing may be regarded as passive, or secondary in character.  The former implies focus on specifics, the latter suggests generalized sensory involvement with the whole of the environment.  Both are natural experiences of varying intensities.

From a composer's perspective it is clear that music and musical perceptions are centered on the act of listening, in ways that dominate the attention, while the function of hearing is of no particular moment in the course of a performance or recording.

Transformation ambient music, in contrast, like ambient music in its original sense, is designed to accommodate both levels of engagement with sound, with the composer taking an active, if reserved, role in the arrangement and production of the works. 

Line, Curve, Motion, Time

Regard like types of imagery in visual, verbal, and auditory modes.

Each appeals to the senses, reflecting color, shape, sound, texture and representations of experience.  In juxtaposition, each suggests the others in complementary nature.

Who desires this understanding will apprehend it in its simplicity; who contemplates it as such will breathe deeply of its complexities.

The future makes its presence felt in the past as well as in the moment.