Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

Ulf Holbrook discusses the 'background' in relation to the three-stage perspective of sound and listening (foreground, mid-ground and background) at Ambient@40, a two-day conference to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release

"Music Beyond Airports", edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, available now in hardcopy and free PDF download via Huddersfield University Press: unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/19

https://www.hf.uio.no/ritmo/english/people/phd-fellows/ulfah/
ambientat40.wordpress.com
archives.electricspring.co.uk/Seasons/2017-2018/Electric-Spring-2018

This presentation took place as part of the Ambient@40 conference, conveyed by Monty Adkins, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, and Kristina Wolfe.

In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference was to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.

The conference took place at the University of Huddersfield from Friday 23 to Saturday 24 February 2018, running alongside the Electric Spring Festival (www.electricspring.co.uk).

/// CREDITS

Video camera operator: Andie Brown, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Sam Gillies
Video edited by Sam Gillies

Title music: Music for Airports (1/1), Brian Eno. Performed by Decibel New Music Ensemble. decibelnewmusic.com

/// ABSTRACT

Attentive listening can been seen as the central concern in our interaction with music. Background music, elevator music, furniture music, muzak or what ever other name it will go by, seeks to occupy the periphery our hearing, defying attentiveness and our active engagement with the music itself.

Not so much as an attempt to disappear, but rather to blend into the background and to make itself seemingly impossible to discern from the other and everyday sounds of the background, ambient music aims to “foreground a devaluation of foregrounding.” (Seth Kim-Cohen “Against Ambience”, p. 33). We do not experience the world in isolation or a vacuum, the things we encounter and experience are referenced and given identity by the other things we encounter and experience. The identity of a “thing” is referenced integrally by a matrix of other things, meanings, perspectives, narratives, overlapping matrices.

This abstract springs out of the Cageian moment of revelation in the anechoic chamber, where he actively interrogated what he was hearing when he wasn’t supposed to be hearing anything and presents a three-stage perspective of sound and listening: foreground, mid-ground and background. The background is rightly so something which “is,” and as such something which we do not pay much attention to. But that does not mean that we are oblivious to it’s existence. The fore-ground is that which commands our immediate attention and focus and the middle-ground draws a link between these two other stages. We might not even notice the mid-ground either but our listening and understanding of the fore-ground cannot exist without the two other stages.

And so, by determining itself to be an unobtrusive background, ambient music as defined by Eno seeks to just “be,” as some divine presence which we cannot interfere, grip or fully come to terms with. By actively attempt to remove the fore-ground we will be immediately drawn to the back-ground and re-create this as the new fore-ground. Media and materials are means to an end and we hear through the transparency of the studio to recognise clearly that we are, in fact, listening to music.

/// BIOGRAPHY

Ulf A. S. Holbrook is an artist, composer, sound artist and researcher who works at the intersection between composition, sound art and sound design. Of central concern of his project is an investigation of the morphological and ontological relationships between time and space. Sound spatialisation and custom software are central aspects of the artistic expression. Currently a Ph.D. researcher at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. My current research project investigates spatialisation technologies in relation to perceptions of texture and sound objects. The academic project stems from my artistic practice and a series of compositions, installations and software packages will be realized next to written academic thesis.