The landscape of ambient music presents unique challenges for critique and classification due to its wide range of subgenres, functions and goals. Often defined by its atmospheric and immersive qualities, ambient music is traditionally seen as providing a backdrop for relaxation or as a means to block out the harsh reality of the outside world. This dominant theory, while valuable in certain contexts, tends to oversimplify the multifaceted nature of ambient music and ignores the potential for more nuanced listening experiences. The proposed alternative theory of interpassivity challenges existing understandings of ambient music production and consumption modes.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics and media studies, interpassivity suggests that, under certain circumstances, audiences can choose to delegate the experience of enjoyment to the music itself. This delegation involves a passive surrender of agency that allows the music to shape the listener’s experience without direct, conscious participation.
To illustrate this, we contrast ambient music with more conventional music styles. Exploring both compositional and audience perspectives, we examine how ambient music’s intentional lack of participation distinguishes it from active and attentive music listening practices. By understanding the interplay between the compositional choices of musicians and the passive role assumed by the audience, we may gain a deeper understanding of the various expressions of the genre. We examine the modes of listening commonly associated with ambient music as a means for interrogating the interpassive nature of the genre.
Scholars argue that ambience in the arts is an active and complex force that shapes our perception and understanding of sound and that it should not be dismissed as passive or inconsequential, but rather be seen as a dynamic element that demands critical engagement. In contrast to an emphasis on active engagement, our perspective accommodates instances where listeners engage in a more passive experience. We advocate for an expanded view of the listener’s role in ambient music, recognising the potential for aesthetic experiences that may emerge from the intentional relinquishment of involvement. This nuanced perspective aligns with the complexities inherent in the genre and enriches the discourse surrounding ambient music, offering a broader framework for its classification and appreciation.
This paper examines The Witness Openlab, a transdisciplinary artistic research project conducted in fall 2023 as part of the pilot phase for a new Master of Arts program at Basel Academy of Music/FHNW. Inspired by Pauline Oliveros' score The Witness, twelve emerging artists and students explored deep listening practices, embodiment, and community-building through two key projects: Urban Witnesses, investigating trans-border communities around Basel, and Soil Witnesses, exploring human-more-than-human relationships in urban gardens.
Drawing on concepts of "worlding" from Martin Heidegger and Donna Haraway, the project positioned the body as an active medium for understanding ecological and social interconnectedness. The methodology integrated ecosomatic practices, and community engagement, culminating in a public presentation at Tinguely Museum Basel that translated collaborative processes into immersive experiences.
While highlighting the transformative potential of embodied practices in fostering ecological consciousness, the paper critically examines the limitations of privileging somatic approaches, arguing for their integration with theoretical frameworks and systemic analysis to avoid aestheticizing ecological connection.
In this contribution, I reflect on the activity of listening as a prerequisite for the development of relations in creative processes in a composition collaboration. The creation process of my piece The Enchanted Forest (2023) with choir Musa Horti (cond. Peter Dejans) serves as example to shed light on some of the manifold aspects of the development of relations when combining individual and collective work. It is part of my artistic doctoral project, where I, based on an understanding of composing and improvising as conglomerates of entangled creative activities, investigate what activities a musical composition is part of, formed and transformed by and how the participants of creative situations are related through their interacting. Guided by asking how to listen to myself while listening to other(s), I describe my understanding of creative processes as contact processes and how listening engenders a transactional relation to the situation (Schön 2017:150), where my body interacts with the material and nonmaterial participants, thus creating the evolving sound and relations between all participants. A concept of listening inspired by listening’s etymological proximity to obeying, gives a key to grasping the tactile dimension of human interaction with sound and links it to Rosa's sociological concept of resonance (Rosa 2018). Through reflecting on The Enchanted Forest’s different stages of collaboration and my individual work with text and sound, I describe listening as something active that involves movement and transformation. Drawing on Rosa’s concept and the tactile dimension of improvising (Meelberg 2022), I trace the diversity of beginnings of developing relations between me, the choir and the musical material. Understanding thus listening to oneself as a premise for listening to other(s), I show its necessity for the development of tacit knowledge and the awareness of different forms of togetherness.
When composing with musical borrowings within repetitive structures, a dual perception often occurs, in which listening shifts its focus from the inherent representation of the borrowings to their immediate sonic presence. This shift in attention is frequently characterized as a form of aesthetic contemplation.
This paper demonstrates an artistic exploration of how the concept of aesthetic contemplation, along with contemplative practices, can inform the compositional process and what techniques this might require.
The research draws on a series of compositional experiments with repetition and fragmentation of musical borrowings as well as on experiences from meditative practice. A central insight of the project is that the aforementioned moments of dual perception are inherently polyphonic in nature. Building on this, a compositional approach of "polyphonizing" is developed.
How can embodied listening be performed, from my ears (body) to yours? How are we (dis)oriented? ‘Braced under the heating sun’ is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities through processes of embodied listening. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there between February and March 2020 (bookended by the waning Australian black summer bush fires and the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic). The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugarcane farm in North Queensland. Although in a tropical climate it has no flyscreens, and air-conditioning in only one room. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior). It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). In this audio paper, I discuss this installation work and my continued research on embodied listening.
theory
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theorize practice
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By using any of these words I am establishing an order of importance among them. My body cannot vocalize two of them at the same time. How in the world can this terrible order of things be abolished? How can we relate to a possible merge of the dichotomy theory/practice through language?
