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Music For Airports |
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“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
 Brian Eno (Music for Airports liner notes, September 1978)
Music is unique among the arts in that it is the only art form that you can’t readily ignore. If you don’t want to see a picture or watch the stage, you can simply close your eyes. But you can’t close your ears.
That is not to say, as Brian Eno does, that you can’t appreciate music on multiple levels. My question is, how do you tend to listen to music?
Personally - and for someone who writes about music all the time this might seem a bit odd - I prefer listening to music in the background. I listen to loud music while I’m working, it helps me be more productive. Rock, jazz, hip hop - music that one might expect to demand attention - provides a backdrop to my thoughts.
(If you’d like to try it, here’s a track of Eno’s Music For Airports for your background listening pleasure.)
Perhaps my affinity for ambient music is part of a larger trend. Music’s increasing portability in society may have lent more popularity to the music as ambiance idea. With the proliferation of iPods and music in public spaces, people are listening less closely than ever before simply because they are bombarded with more music than ever before. Classical music concerts, in which listening is just about the only activity one can engage in, are considered boring by many and are certainly less titillating than the image heavy spectacle of a decent rock or hip hop show.
Indeed, music’s increased portability goes along with its increased accessibility. Every computer with an Internet connection has access to a library of performances on a scale unthinkable to our forebears. Music used to be an event, a rare and unique occurrence because it had to be performed live every time. Today, music is another commodity we trade, further pushing it into the background of our thoughts.
For some people I know, music as ambiance is nearly impossible. Music demands their full attention. When they are trying to concentrate on other things, music is simply distracting. Sometimes I envy those people. Because music is often a background pursuit for me, I have less incentive to actively go out and find to new sounds. Well worn favorites fill up the background just as well as new stuff. And of course, I’m not really listening, and so on some level, I’m not appreciating the art to its fullest capacity (unless, of course, I’m listening to Brian Eno, who would be perfectly happy with my lack of attention).
So, I’m interested in having a discussion. Do you listen to music in the background, like I do, or does it command your full attention? How do you see the increased accessibility of music affecting a person’s listening habits?
You know, I was doing some reading while listening to some music in Hindi (okay, I admit it was Bollywood tunes…) last night, and I found the music incredibly distracting. At first, I attempted just to turn down the volume, make it possible for my inner monologue to supersede the external input. But that didn’t work.
I moved to another genre (jazz) and was able to focus much better. However, I still found myself following the music as I read. Musically speaking, the jazz is much more complex, and it was not necessarily slower, quieter, less rhythmic than the Hindi music. So maybe it was a matter of music with words versus instrumental? Or music I’ve known for years versus music I’ve only recently begun to enjoy? Or the fact that Hindi music, by its many associations with other things on my mind, made it impossible for me to push those other things out of my mind and focus on the task at hand.
The amount of attention music demands seems to vary on the circumstances. Perhaps others have encountered similar situations. J-Ro?