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thanks to insomnia, ambient noise is becoming a cottage industry
calum marsh: it does seem a little bit miraculous that a place can be summoned to mind so easily in the character of its silence
jan 2 2020
5 minute read
calm and discreet, delicate and unassuming, this music ?must be as ignorable as it is interesting.?
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by calum marsh
at my apartment in downtown toronto, late at night, i can hear cars, creaking floorboards and pipes. ambient sound is inescapable — whatever incidental noises happen to be circulating in earshot at any moment by definition qualify, including the din of muffled voices, refrigerator hums, air-conditioning purrs and distant footfalls that comprise the daily cacophony of our homes and offices, so constant and unobtrusive that we tend to tune the lot of it out.
last winter, i bought a google home, and when i go to bed now, it whisks me off somewhere far away: to the twilit countryside, or to a house on the ocean, or to a cabin in the woods with a roaring fire. its built-in library of ambient sounds are beautiful and transporting. it can summon a riot of crickets, or the steady wash of a hard rainfall, or the rhythmic undulation of waves crashing against a shore. they relax me tremendously, and make it, i find, much easier to fall asleep. it’s not a matter of imagining that i’m somewhere other than in the middle of the city. it’s simply that this regular, low-level flow of subtle noise is a more comfortable silence than the sounds inherent to my room.
the google home’s ambient library is the work of nick zammuto, former member of the acclaimed experimental indie rock duo the books, who now works as a sound designer on the google assistant personality team in massachusetts. zammuto’s albums thought for food and the lemon of pink were vast technicolour collages of idiosyncratic samples and patchwork soundscapes; it is curiously appropriate that he would graduate to full-blown ambience. he recorded most of the home sounds himself in his own backyard when he was living in vermont, synthesizing them with effects from cinematic sound banks that google owns the rights to and layering and mixing them to maximize their breadth and immersiveness.
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a babbling brook has a crystalline clarity that’s almost therapeutic; a heavy thunderstorm is so rich and full you can feel the black clouds. listening to this stuff, silence starts to sound like art.
zammuto is neither the first, nor only artist to find the beauty in ambient sound.
there is a short scene in the manchester music-biz biopic 24 hour party people in which tony wilson, head of nascent post-punk label factory records, visits martin hannett, legendary producer of albums by joy division and new order, on a hill in the middle of the pennines. “what are you doing up there?” wilson bellows up from the base. “recording,” hannett grumbles, a big boom mic held aloft at nothing, annoyed to be interrupted. “i’m recording silence.” the moment is meant to establish hannett as a kind of brilliant eccentric, a genius of pure vision and obscure method. but of course he wasn’t recording silence, not really. he was recording the texture and complexion of the air around english mountain peaks — its specific tenor, a precise shade of nothing called its ambience. silence in the pennines doesn’t sound quite like silence anywhere else. every silence has a sound. every sound is unique.
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in 1951, john cage, the influential american composer, visited an anechoic chamber, a room insulated in such a way as to be as close to completely silent as possible, in the science labs at harvard. “in that silence room, i heard two sounds, one high and one low,” cage later described. “afterward, i asked the engineer in charge why, if the room was so silent, i had heard two sounds.” the engineer told cage it was his own body producing the noises: the high sound was his nervous system, the low sound was his blood. cage left with a new appreciation for the meaning of silence. he understood that what we think of as silence is not silence at all — rather it is ambience, “non-intentional sounds” pervading the air. “this ambience has always been there,” says the sound designer rob godman. “whether or not we pay attention to it is another matter.”
but in the second half of the 20th century, in the wake of cage’s theories about silences and sound, composers began to produce their own original ambient recordings, intended to be heard and not heard simultaneously, no more conspicuous than an oscillating fan in the corner of the room. ambient music, as father of the genre, brian eno, said, must “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.” calm and discreet, delicate and unassuming, this music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
eno saw the value in what we took for granted in the background of our lives. he wanted to make it possible for us to change the ambience we were stuck with — to furnish us with sounds that might facilitate our concentration, or calm our nerves, or even help us sleep. his ambient albums, beginning with ambient 1: music for airports in 1978, redefined minimalism and invented a style of modern classical that has continued to fascinate. at the same time, sound designers have made strides in a field of ambience that has rather less to do with music and more to do with silence and sound. they have developed a practice of channeling the character of spaces into recordings that can conjure those spaces in different contexts. in other words, they capture ambience so that the silences we’re stuck with can be replaced.
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today, ambient sound has become the inspiration for something of a cottage industry. on the website a soft murmur, gabriel martin drums up thunder and wind, fire and rain, crickets and singing bowls — and lets the listener pick and choose among these, mixing and matching to make an ambient collage of their own. his effects are derived from a huge range of recordings licensed from sound designers online: summer rain from a house in the middle of denmark, birdsong from a scottish forest, crickets and owls found in texas at night. another site, coffitivity, offers coffee shop recordings, including “brazil bistro” and “university undertones,” for the sake of increased productivity. the new york times quotes research showing that “a level of ambient noise typical of a bustling coffee shop or a television playing in a living room enhanced performance compared with relative quiet.” according to sites like coffitivity, some silences are better than others.
perhaps it’s telling that in the pursuit of better sleep, studying or relaxation, our most advanced technology aspires to reconnect us with the environments we’ve spurned to get here in the first place. asking a google home to lull you to sleep in your downtown apartment with the sound of a country idyll is an irony on par with the desktop background set forever to images of the outdoors. on the other hand, it does seem a little bit miraculous that a place can be summoned to mind so easily in the character of its silence, that something about the wind in the woods or the tide of the ocean can be captured and bottled up to use elsewhere.
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it might make us think more carefully about the nature of the — well, the nature around us every day, of the ambience that is the perpetual, ignorable backdrop of our lives.
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