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Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It is often "peaceful" sounding and lacks composition, beat, and/or structured melody.[5] It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening[6] and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation.[7][8] The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual",[9] or "unobtrusive" quality.[10]Naturesoundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.[11]
Ambient music did not achieve large commercial success, being criticized as everything from "dolled-up new age, [..] to boring and irrelevant technical noodling".[16] Nevertheless, it has attained a certain degree of acclaim throughout the years, especially in the Internet age. Due to its relatively open style, ambient music often takes influences from many other genres, ranging from classic, avant-garde music, experimental music, folk, jazz, and world music, amongst others.[17][18]
^ abDrone is now classified as a subgenre of ambient music, but early drone music influenced the origin of ambient. See the other note from Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cook & Pople 2004, p. 502), and the note from Four Musical Minimalists (Potter 2002, p. 91).
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^The Ambient Century by Mark Prendergast, Bloomsbury, London, 2003.
^Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening & Other Moodsong by Joseph Lanza, Quartet, London, 1995.
^Crossfade: A Big Chill Anthology, Serpents Tail, London, 2004.
^George Grove, Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Macmillan Publishers, 1st ed., 1980 (ISBN0-333-23111-2), vol. 7 (Fuchs to Gyuzelev), "André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry", p. 708: "in L'épreuve villageoise, where the various folk elements – couplet form, simplicity of style, straightforward rhythm, drone bass in imitation of bagpipes – combine to express at once ingenuous coquetry and sincerity."
^New Sounds: The Virgin Guide To New Music by John Schaefer, Virgin Books, London, 1987.
^"Each spoke, tracing a thin pie-shape out of the whole, would contribute to the modern or New Ambient movement: new age, neo-classical, space, electronic, ambient, progressive, jazzy, tribal, world, folk, ensemble, acoustic, meditative, and back to new age... "New Age Music Made SimpleArchived 2010-04-05 at the Wayback Machine