Patch from Scratch: "Eurorack Ambient"

Published on Nov 21, 2018 MAKEN0ISE

"Relax.

The patch for this video was inspired by classic ambient and furniture music, as well as by currently popular ambient modular composers here on YouTube.

Erik Satie first introduced the notion of “furniture music”, music specifically made not to be the center of attention.

He made some other musical innovations that are pertinent to ambient music, including;

1. The removal of bar lines from sheet music. (The experience of playing pieces in this style, such as the 6 Gnossienes, is that of finding the meter that arises between the note durations rather than having it dictated by the outward structure of the piece.)

2. The notion of exact temporal durations in minutes and seconds being prioritized as the main structural element of pieces.

In a letter, John Cage once wrote: “the importance due [Satie] [is], I believe, to have consistently structured his music on lengths of time rather than harmonic relations. I’m sure he was aware of doing this but I doubt whether he knew its real importance, which is real: liberation from the Beethoven yoke, far more real than that granted by S[choenberg] with the 12-tone row.”

The best known pioneer of “ambient music” *as such* is Brian Eno.

For Eno, Ambient music should function equally well in the background and the foreground. “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

The first record in Eno’s Ambient Series, "Music for Airports", was created by allowing long tape loops of differing durations to overlap each other. Each element repeated periodically, but the juxtaposition of elements was different each time.

Other pieces in Eno’s ouvre use similar techniques, including those in other media such as the phone app “Bloom” and the audiovisual installation “77 Million Paintings”.

Today the tag “Eurorack Ambient” is popular on YouTube and other social media. Popular artists include Emily Sprague, Lightbath, r beny, and ann annie.

We don’t want to pigeonhole an art form that is still taking shape, but there are some themes to be found here too. None of the following should be understood as a hard-and-fast rule in any way:

1. The visual element is often not dynamic, but is presented as a soothing environment. Many videos feature a shot in muted tones of a mostly-untouched Eurorack synthesizer, in a calm setting with well-placed plants, and a backdrop of windows overlooking pleasing skylines, or being splattered with rain.

2. The sound palette is often limited to simple and pleasing sounds with vague but present melodic content, and free of dramatic dynamic changes. This is true of Satie’s and Eno’s music as well.

3. Previously undesirable sounds such as “tape hiss”, “radio noise”, “crackle” are aesthetically pleasing and enhance the overall effect if carefully filtered and mixed low.

The present patch utilizes three relatively sparse voices whose “loops” are only tangentially connected to each other in terms of duration/“loop points”. We hope you enjoy it. "