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.
