Passive Listening: Exploring Interpassivity in Ambient Music

Ambient Music: Functions and Perceptions

A way to consider the ambient genre of music could be to examine its function as related to its listeners and the role it fulfils for them. Thus, a theory has emerged that ambient music serves as a form of escapism from the stresses of everyday life (Burdon 2023; Hu et al. 2023; Yu et al. 2016). This position is further bolstered by the use of ambient music for yoga, massage and other relaxation practices to create a sense of calm and tranquillity. Through such use, the genre has commonly been reduced to its purported therapeutic qualities and to its associated functions such as to enhance listeners’ creative activities, to help stimulate listeners’ imagination, or providing a backdrop for creative pursuits such as writing or painting.

In addition to its personal uses, ambient music has also found its way into a variety of other applications and has been folded into capitalist modes of consumption including film and video game soundtracks, advertising, and even retail environments (Manzoor 2024). In these contexts, ambient music is used to create a specific mood or atmosphere or to evoke a sense of place or time in order to enhance or improve various consumerist behaviours.

Theoretical Foundations of Ambient Music

The music itself has been subject to analyses by various authors, notably David Toop (1995) and Mark Prender­gast (2003), among others. If Brian Eno’s perspective is to be taken as authoritative in some respect, then his intention was clear on Discreet Music (1975): ambient music was not meant for active, attentive listening. Instead, Eno promoted a mode of engagement with it that would allow for diverse levels of attention. This position is once again articulated in Eno’s liner notes for Music for Airports (1978), where he proposes that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” This duality, which Simon Cummings (2019) calls “ignoresting,” suggests that ambient music must be capable of accommodating various degrees of listener focus.

Cummings expands on Eno’s ideas by introducing the term "steady state," borrowed from Fred Hoyle’s cosmological model. According to Cum­mings, ambient music is characterised by its capacity to maintain a sense of equilibrium over long periods while presenting subtle variations over shorter time­scales. This equilibrium allows the music to remain unobtrusive over the long term, while small changes capture the listener’s intermittent interest. Cum­mings contrasts this with the works of earlier composers such as Erik Satie, whose musique d’ameublement was intended to be background music but lacked the short-term variability that defines the steady state concept. He argues instead that the music of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich is more aligned with the “steady state” model. Their compositions, such as Riley’s In C (1964) and Reich’s Piano Phase (1967), exhibit both long-term stasis and short-term variation, fitting the ambient music paradigm more closely than Satie’s works. This distinction is crucial in understanding the evolution of ambient music and its theoretical underpinnings.

The question of what constitutes appropriate timescales for the steady state concept remains open to interpretation. For instance, Curtis Roads’ (2004) concept of microsound, involving the manipulation of small sonic fragments, raises questions about the relativity of time scales in ambient music. Does the ambient tradition necessitate long durations, or can short compositions also embody the steady state principle?

Additionally, the dichotomy between foreground and background music, as discussed by Ulf Holbrook (2019) and Richard Talbot (2019), reflects Eno’s own insights. His often-cited experience of listening to eighteenth-century harp music at a low volume while recovering from illness led him to perceive music as part of the ambient environment, akin to the colour of light or the sound of rain. This realisation highlighted the significance of the listening environment in shaping the music experience.

Thus, ambient music leads listeners to engage with their surroundings in new ways, encouraging an awareness of the interplay between sound and environment. This approach challenges common notions of music consumption, proposing that music can enhance environmental perception rather than dominate it. As such, ambient music listening can be understood not merely as an act of focused attention, but also as a process of absorption and immersion, where the boundaries between listening and non-listening become blurred. In this sense, ambient music listening can be argued to include non-listening as a crucial part of the arrangement.

Interpassivity and the Listener

In this era of digital interconnectedness, the distribution and publication channels for ambient music have multiplied and diversified. It is now possible to find countless playlists on streaming platforms such as Spotify dedicated to ambient music.¹ Additionally, many channels on the YouTube platform regularly publish long-form ambient compositions that routinely exceed three or four hours in duration.² The accompanying visuals often revolve around cosmic travel, along with other themes vaguely reminiscent of science fiction. With such long durations, obvious questions arise. What are the modes of engagement with such music and what are the compositional methods and intentions for such compositions? Here we can only speculate as information about the production processes involved in generating this kind of music is sparse and somewhat opaque, not to mention the difficulties related to surveying the listenership of these channels. Suffice it to say that on the surface, these channels serve subscribers in the thousands.

Would it be fair to assume that listeners of this content engage in a type of listening characterised by the deliberate absence of attention to the music, as Eno advocates? Indeed, it is difficult to envision large numbers of listeners engaging in profound listening for extended periods. Similarly, it is improbable that composers of such music labour over every aspect of their compositions. Instead, these compositions are likely a result of highly automated technological assemblages with minimal human interventions in order to create pieces of significant durations. It seems that on both ends of the composer-listener continuum, there are human agents who deliberately withdraw from their customary duties. The situation could be summarised by saying that ambient music is composed by nobody and is listened to by nobody. As much as this statement may seem like a criticism of the genre and poetic and poietic engagement with it, on the contrary, it is an observation that allows us to look for and explore theoretical mechanisms which could account for this arrangement.

In the mid-1990s, Robert Pfaller introduced the term interpassivity and with it, a conceptual framework that redefines the dynamics of interaction between individuals and cultural artefacts. It was a response to a movement in the arts at the time which privileged audience participation and interactivity with artistic products. Examples of interactive art such as participatory installations where some characteristic of the art responds to the audience's input are plentiful, including Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1989), Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Deep Contact (1984–1989), Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Un­ti­tled (Free) (1992), or Marina Abra­mo­vić’s Rhythm 0 (1974). Such a movement a priori elevates activity over passivity as more beneficial and, at least artistically, more interesting.

Rooted in psychoanalytic theory, interpassivity posits the ability of individuals to delegate their own experience of enjoyment to external agents, allowing these agents to partake in enjoyment on their behalf. Pfaller coined the term based on previous work of others, namely Slavoj Žižek who in his 1989 work The Sublime Object of Ideology observed a phenomenon of so-called ‘canned laughter’ in which a prerecorded laugh track accompanies the supposed humorous lines of a television show. Žižek’s observation was that the role of the laugh track was not simply to trigger laughter in a viewer but rather to laugh on behalf of or instead of the viewer. He points out that afterwards, the viewer can confidently say that, through the medium of the other, they had a good time. Žižek connects this phenomenon to that of the chorus in a Greek play³ as expounded by Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psy­cho­anal­y­sis (1992) where Lacan posits that the role of the chorus is to feel emotions instead of the audience. He explains: “Your emotions are taken charge of by the healthy order displayed on the stage. The Chorus takes care of them. The emotional commentary is done for you. It is just sufficiently silly; it is also not without firmness; it is more or less human. Therefore, you don’t have to worry; even if you don’t feel anything, the Chorus will feel in your stead” (Lacan 1992, 252).

Subsequently, many additional illustrative instances of interpassivity have been proffered by Žižek and Pfaller. These examples encompass the spectrum of ordinary daily experiences. For brevity, we will only mention one example from Pfaller here. A familiar act of a student (or an intellectual, as Pfaller has it) photocopying pages from a library book, then returning the book and feeling the satisfaction as though they have done the work of reading the book. This feeling of satisfaction is fully provided by the photocopier itself whose “light of attention, as it were, is shed on every page, one after another, in a linear process” (Pfaller 2017, 51). The machine has read the pages in the student’s stead.

It seems that the very existence of the term enables us to notice more examples of this phenomenon even in current times. For instance, recording a live concert using a mobile phone only to refrain from viewing the footage after the event. In this case, it could be argued that the act of recording the video is not directly related to its subsequent viewing but instead fulfils a purpose at the time of recording, namely, to create a barrier between the observer and the performance. A genuine encounter of a devoted fan with a live performance of their beloved music is often a burden on the symbolic identity of the spectator. By holding a phone between themselves and the performance, an individual can create a physical barrier that symbolically shifts the burden of direct engagement away from themselves and onto the device. This phone acting as an intermediary suggests an unconscious desire to distance oneself from the emotional intensity of the live experience. By placing a phone between themselves and the performance, it is as if the device feels emotions on behalf of the spectator.

Other curious examples of interpassivity can be observed in the virtual domain of the internet. Unboxing videos are a popular genre of content on online video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. In these videos, a person who has bought usually an expensive or desirable object proceeds to diligently open the packaging in which the object is placed. These videos tend to develop slowly, step by step removing the layers of protective cardboard and plastic to reveal the object inside, giving them a dimension of eroticism not usually associated with commodities. It is difficult not to be reminded of Marx’s commodity fetishism here, albeit a rather literal interpretation of it. Another example is the so-called Mukbang videos in which individuals film themselves consuming copious amounts of food (Choe 2019). Originating in South Korea and deriving its name from “muk” for eating and “bang” for broadcast, these types of videos have gained global popularity with individuals who adapt the content to suit different cultural tastes and preferences. The basic arrangement here is that someone enjoys consuming food while an audience watches along.

To further illustrate this concept within the realm of music, consider the well-known quote regarding audiophiles’ obsession with their sound reproduction equipment commonly attributed to Alan Parsons that goes something along the lines of “audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to music, they use music to listen to their equipment.”⁴ This quote indicates a certain truth about the audiophile's relationship with their equipment. It suggests a displacement of the pleasure of listening from the music itself to the equipment used to reproduce it. The interpassive adaptation of this quote would be that audiophiles do not enjoy music, rather it is their equipment that enjoys music on their behalf.

Through the above examples, we can see that it is possible for our feelings like enjoyment and satisfaction to assume external existence. Moreover, ‘objectifying’ these feelings does not diminish them in a subjective sense but rather, once we transfer them onto an external agent, it makes them essential to reality. It is as if acknowledging that these experiences are not merely confined to our own minds but have a tangible presence in the world around us, renders them more ontologically potent (Pfaller 2017).

Interpassivity and the Composer

In our own practice of composing ambient music, we have observed a certain interpassive element. It is not uncommon while composing a piece of ambient music to leave our hardware and software machines running for extended periods of time. The justification for this tendency is the supposed need to hear the sonic development of the piece being composed through algorithmic, often aleatoric methods. While the machine composes, we are free to make a cup of tea or attend to other mundane daily responsibilities all the while objectively being able to say that we are engaged in the task of music composition.

As previously argued, inherent within the ambient music genre, there exists a degree of harmonic stasis or “steady state” (Cummings 2019), with an emphasis on texture and atmosphere rather than harmonic motion. From a personal perspective, having a high degree of involvement in both jazz and ambient genres, this is indeed the experienced phenomenon. Allowing time for sounds, notes and textures to evolve is integral to the ambient music genre. Therefore many personal compositions arise from either a drone or keyboard ‘pad’, often with an inherent or externally applied movement to the sound. Thereafter, asynchronous audio loops of melodic fragments or algorithmic melodic generations are applied (Fig. 1). During this process, the piece is allowed to play continuously while attentive listening is engaged, whereby small changes might be applied where obvious clashes or undesirable dissonances occur. Afterwards, the piece is allowed to play whilst other non-related tasks are performed, such as reading a book. In this mode, if an adjustment in pitch, volume or tone seems necessary, those changes are made, but often the piece is allowed to play without any further interaction. The piece of music is performing its own collisions and layers, particularly where asynchronous events are involved, and ‘tweaks’ might be made to suit a purely personal auditory experience. Generally, the music is allowed to continue and is often recorded for later review with respect to an intended published output, while the music is barely audible or even muted. Anal­o­gous to the photocopier example, it is almost as if the media is listening to itself.

When composing ambient music with a modular synthesiser, the procedure of configuring various modules into a final patch can take a significant amount of time. During the patch creation process, one hears the sonic output of the patch throughout and becomes accustomed to its behaviour and sound. It is common to set up sub-patches that modify the behaviour of one of the elements of the composition. The influence of these sub-patches may take time to fully develop and unfold, especially when modulation sources are set to slow settings where a cycle takes several minutes to complete. It is a common personal practice to speed up these processes in such a way that the effects of various modulations can be heard in quick succession. By temporarily increasing the speed of these processes, the composer can quickly audition the effects of various modulations and fine-tune their ranges to stay within the desired sonic boundaries. This, however, is different from how the listeners will eventually experience the composition temporally. For them, the piece will take much longer to develop, thus, it is necessary to let these processes run at the intended rate. During the operation of the patch, the modules react to one another’s outputs, in turn generating new outputs for other modules to react to (Fig. 2). The machine is observing itself and, in effect, listening to itself while the composer is free to pursue other activities. There remains a strong sense that one is nonetheless involved in the task of music composition even as they are engaged in something else.

These personal music-making experiences highlight the nuanced ways in which interpassivity can manifest in the compositional process. The act of composing, traditionally perceived as an active and intentional endeavour, can also involve a degree of delegation of not only the compositional tasks, but also of enjoyment of those processes suggesting a blurring of boundaries between the composer, the music-making tools, and the music. To us, this reinforces the notion that interpassivity is not exclusively observed as a mode of consumption but can also be observed in the production of music, particularly in the ambient genre.

Conclusion

Interpassivity present in ambient music challenges conventional notions of the listener’s role, prompting us more broadly to reconsider what it means to engage with music. From its roots in Eno’s concept of “as ignorable as it is interesting” to Cummings’ (2019) “steady state” formulation of compositions, ambient music allows for a withdrawal of both the composer’s and the listener’s active engagement. The genre encourages modes of interaction where one can delegate the enjoyment of both music composition and listening to external agents, whether they be machines or passive environmental settings. This phenomenon complicates the way we understand both artistic creation and musical consumption, blurring the lines between active and passive involvement.

The question that arises from this discussion is whether interpassivity is an exclusive characteristic of ambient music, or if it extends to other genres as well. Could certain modes of engagement in genres like pop, jazz, or classical music also be described as interpassive? Is all music, in some way, designed to be enjoyed on behalf of the listener? And what of the social dimension of listening practices? These questions invite further exploration into how interpassivity functions across different musical traditions and what this implies for our broader understanding of music's role in contemporary culture.

References

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