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A QUESTION OF BACKGROUNDS:
SITES OF LISTENING
Ulf Holbrook
In 1951 John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at the University of Harvard.
He expected to hear silence; what he heard has now become a legendary
anecdote about this experience. Twenty-four years later from his sick bed,
Brian Eno had a revelatory experience of listening to music through a broken
hi- while conned to a hospital bed. Although several years apart, these
two individual experiences both stimulated new modes of engaging with,
creating, listening to and understanding music. ese two distinct creation
myths (to use Seth Kim-Cohen’s description1) are reference points from
which the discussions in this chapter develop. e intent in this chapter is
to examine the site of listening in which these two events took place, not
the physical locus itself, but as the contextual site in which these two events
took place: namely, the ‘background’. e discussion of ambient music will be
centred around Brian Eno’s Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for
Airports (1978). Ambient 1 was the rst mention of the term ‘ambient music’,
yet the roots of what led to this development are evident in Discreet Music.
All references to ambient music will be based on Eno’s liner notes from these
two albums.
By focussing on the background, we can pose several questions: How
can we understand the sonic foreground if we do not consider or disregard
the sonic background? What role has the background for the contextual
perception of what is in the foreground? I will argue that the background is
the context which supports our listening, and that this contextual presence is
1 Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2016).
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integral to our understanding of the music we are listening to. is chapter
seeks to address these questions through the perspectives of music, lm
sound, game sound and 3D audio applications.
ese dierent sites of listening share one central aspect which permeates
the act of listening, namely the acousmatic. e acousmatic listening situation
is one in which the source of a heard sound cannot be seen.2 In this way, the
acousmatic listening experience of a sound becomes a subjective perceptual
experience, which has ontological consequences for how we understand the
sound. Importantly, acousmatic listening forces us to focus on the sound itself
and not the potential source, and this focus implies an intentionality in our
listening. Sites of listening share and reference various narratives, and are linked
by common conceptual threads and metaphors which intersect and overlap.
Silence in site
Seated on a chair in the anechoic chamber, John Cage heard two sounds –
one high and one low. e engineer in charge told him that the high-pitched
sound was his nervous system and the low-pitched sound was his blood
system.3 Famously this experience inspired the composition of Cage’s ‘silent
piece’, 4’33’’ (1952), which is scored for any instrument or combination of
instruments, where the performers are instructed not to play their instruments
during the three movements. Indeed, the piece is far from silent. Cage wanted
to focus the audience’s attention on one particular aspect of musical and sonic
perception, specically that when music is silenced, there is still sound. “Until
I die there will be sounds”,4 Cage wrote about the experience in the anechoic
chamber, arguing that there is no such thing as silence.
2 Pierre Schaeer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay Across Disciplines, trans. by Christine North and
John Dack (Oakland, CA.: University of California Press, 2017).
3 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2010), 8.
4 Ibid., 8.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
Cage wanted to let sounds be themselves. is was a mode of understanding
sound and music on its own terms and not simply “man-made theories of
expressions of human sentiments”.5 Yet in the anechoic chamber there was
also a third sound. Douglas Kahn observes that,
[…] there was a third internal sound isolated, the one saying,
‘Hmmm, wonder what the low-pitched sound is? What’s that high-
pitched sound?’6
is observation indicates a level of mental activity which is in a constant
state of analysis, in an ever-present listening situation. is mental mode
of analysis could be seen to run counter to the credo of allowing sounds
to exist of their own accord and we as human listeners merely to accept
them. Cage was faced with the sounds of his own body as an acousmatic
experience: rst through hearing unidentied sounds; then, by recognising
them, understanding that the room was not silent after all. Finally, he realised
that this situation was not something he could control and that such sounds
are there regardless of surroundings and circumstances.
In 4’33’’, Cage suppresses the traditional structuring of both a musical
creation and a musical performance and brings the ambient environmental
presence to the foreground. e background, which we ‘listen beyond’ at
concerts, is now the focus of our attention. Like Cage, we hear that it is not
only the sounds of the ventilation system, the passing cars and the shifting
people next to us which make up this background sound: our own rumbling
stomachs, head-scratching and movements also make up the totality of the
sonic experience. James Pritchett has observed that:
5 Ibid., 10.
6 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA.: e MIT Press,
1999), 190.
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Confronted with the silence, in a setting we cannot control, and
where we do not expect this kind of event, we might have any
number of responses: we might desire for it to be over, or desire for
more interesting sounds to listen to, or we might feel frightened,
insulted, pensive, cultured, baed, doubtful, bored, agitated, tickled,
sleepy, attentive, philosophical, or, because we “get it,” a bit smug.7
Cage’s text, in which he proclaims that there will be sound until his death, was
originally given as a presentation to the Music Teachers National Association
in 1957. Like Brian Eno’s liner notes for Discreet Music and Music for Airports,
I view these texts as artist statements that both comment on the origins
and artistic motivations of the music as much as the technical and creative
process. Had Cage never visited an anechoic chamber, such a physical setting
would have remained an idealised space in which to experience silence.
As Douglas Kahn has pointed out, the third sound in the anechoic chamber
was Cage’s internal voice interrogating what he heard. is interrogation is as
much a product of the surprise he must have felt at hearing sound in a space
where he expected to hear nothing, as it is from a desire to analyse a listening
perspective to separate sounds from their causes to hear them as themselves.
e act of ‘silencing’, or desire to explore silence, was explored by Cage in
a number of works, despite his surprise experience in the anechoic chamber.
Although 4’33’’ has arguably become one of his most famous (silent) musical
works, pre-dating it is the unrealised Silent Prayer (1948). Cage wanted
to compose a work of silent music and sell it to the Muzak Corporation,
eectively silencing the utilitarian sonic accompaniment of commercialism.8
Although never realised, Silent Prayer was located outside the traditional
connes of the concert hall (where 4’33’’ was located) and the “western
7 James Pritchett, “What silence taught John Cage: e story of 4’33’’,” e anarchy of silence: John Cage
and experimental art (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani di Barcelona, 2009), 167.
8 Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience and Other Essays (New York and London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2016), 17-20.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
compositional tradition, which was, after all, his target”.9 With the silencing
of background Muzak, Cage wanted people (all people, not just concert goers)
to attend to the sounds of their surroundings and not have them masked by
an unobtrusive yet omnipresent soundtrack. Whatever the potential impact
of Silent Prayer, turning the attention towards the concert hall with 4’33’’
engenders more concentrated and focused listening.
Douglas Kahn points out that Silent Prayer was more about conventional
notions of silence than the silencing of an ever-present soundtrack, yet the
result would still have been an increase in the environmental ‘background’
sound. e question still remains whether listeners would feel a sense of
liberation having being freed from such functional music within their
ambient environment, and thereby experience a heightened sonic awareness
of their surroundings, or would be disconcerted by a sense of absence arising
from the ubiquity of such Muzak.
Thresholds of sites
In the liner notes to Discreet Music (1975), Eno relates the story of his
listening to an album of eighteenth century harp music a friend had brought
him whilst in hospital. Having put the album on and gone back to his bed,
Eno realised that the volume was set too low and one of the speakers was
broken. Lacking the energy to get up and do something about it, Eno instead
listened to the album just above the threshold of the background noise. is
experience sparked in him a new way of hearing music mediated through or
as an additional layer within our everyday environment.
Although pre-dating Ambient 1 by three years, this experience, which led
to Discreet Music, helped dene the structure and formulation of what Eno
came to call ambient music. Later, in 1978, in the liner notes to Ambient 1:
Music for Airports, Eno introduces the concept of ambient music and describes
9 Ibid., 19.
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ambience as atmosphere and “a surrounding inuence”.10
Eno’s epiphany arose from the fact that, for the most part, we expect things
just to work and when they do we ignore them as objects and only relate to
the function each object aords. Only when an object stops functioning in
the way we expect it to does our attention or awareness become more intently
focussed on it. is functional awareness was exacerbated as Eno was ill and
unable to get up easily and rectify the faulty equipment. Had Eno been at
home in his living room, the experience could have simply sparked irritation
over having to sort out the broken speaker, or the volume dial swiftly cranked
to compensate for the lack of volume, so producing a very dierent listening
experience. Listening to music at, or just below, the environmental noise oor,
is an attempt to steer listeners away from hearing the music as music per se,
and rather as something that melds into the background, interspersing the
sounds of cutlery or as soft playback at a shopping centre or in an elevator.
e spatial constructs which surround us provide a state of ux from
which to interpret listening as a type of ambiguity, particularly so for the
two historical examples cited so far. Both situations – the sick bed and the
anechoic chamber – not only provided important insights into modes of
listening for both Eno and Cage, but the experience also prompted insights
into the sites of listening. Each site prompts a dierent mode of listening,
either to the sounds of your own body or to music which seems to be both
audible and inaudible. Listening from his hospital bed prompted in Eno an
awareness of his immediate spatial sonic environment and the relationship
of the harp music to these surroundings, the music to the listener, and the
listener to the surroundings. In one site we expect there to be sounds and the
other site we expect silence. Both events bear a resemblance, in the acuity of
the listening experience, to what Laurie Spiegel calls “slow change music”,
10 Brian Eno, ‘Ambient Music’, liner notes from the initial American release of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1:
Music for Airports (PVC 7908 (AMB 001), 1978).
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
in which there is “little density of change, slow change, minimal change”11
and as a result causes the ear to be more and more sensitive to subtle shifts
in the music. For Spiegel and Eno, there is also an aesthetic emphasis and
preference on the types of sounds used to create this perceptual state, while
for Cage, it was about the sounds being themselves. Although dierent in
intent, Cage’s and Eno’s work inuences our listening by drawing attention
to the subtle changes in the background. Cage’s understanding that there was
no such thing as silence related to his mode of perceiving his surroundings.
Although Cage’s oeuvre contains open works of any duration, particularly
the happenings (1959-1968), it is Eno’s ambient ‘surrounding’ music – which
could last forever. is is in part due to Eno’s compositional method, and his
use of technology, particularly generative software, where the slow change
of sonic materials and variation of their density can become vastly extended.
The site of wallpaper
e wallpaper, furniture and background all come into view when reading
Eno’s liner notes and listening to his subsequent music productions. One
can understand Joanna Demers’ comment that “ambient musicians in general
seem a highly secure bunch, content to make music to be ignored”.12 Citing
Erik Satie13 and Muzak14, Eno is clear that his music should be suitable both
to be listened to and to be ignored. Long drawn out melodic lines, with no
sharp attacks and long decays, lend themselves to music that could be played
continuously for extended periods of time. Prolonged listening would enable
this music to drift in and out of the background. Indeed, the inspirations from
11 Laurie Spiegel, “She has the technology,” interview with Frances Morgan, e Wire, October 2012,
issue 344.
12 Joanna Demers, Listening rough the Noise: e Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 116.
13 Brian Eno, Discreet Music (CD) (Virgin Records Ltd., ENOCDX 5, 2009).
14 Brian Eno, liner notes, Ambient 1: Music for Airports (CD) (Virgin Records Ltd., ENOCDX 6,
2009).
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both La Monte Young and Steve Reich are evident, in their almost hypnotic
repetitions. Yet, repetition also indicates a change, which becomes evident
over time. e presumed attening of a music such as ambient propagates a
dierence between foreground and background in its temporal experience.
e object of audition is not changed in any way, rather the change happens
in the receiving subject.
It is clear that the intentional act of selecting a piece of music for listening
certainly does not warrant a want or desire to ignore the music. Rather, all are
intentional acts that have a clear sense of purpose. If the music is experienced
in a dierent setting, say an airport terminal, then we return to the direction
outlined in Discreet Music, where the music exists at times above and at times
below the threshold of background sounds. In this way, ambient music is
placed in a space where it cannot be critiqued. Seth Kim-Cohen points out a
key aspect in the interpretation and understanding of such art works, namely
that “one of the sites to which any work must be specic is the site of art
history: of the traditions, works, artists and ideas to which it responds. It
doesn’t matter if an artwork wants to be engaged thus. It happens anyway”.15
e importance of this insight is that all works will always be viewed in
context to some other object, thing or creation to which it stands in some
form of relationship.
Being ignorable can be seen both as an insistence on being left to one’s
own devices as well as an insistence on aspects of timelessness. e long,
stretched out, soft passages, with predominantly tonal and simple melodic
contours, imply a music that could continue on into innity (were it not for the
listener pressing the stop button). One of the strengths in this type of musical
communication is the freedom to hint at and imply spatial relationships both
in the musical material and in the listener’s reception of the material. Unlike
other genres or modes of communication, ambient music can freely move
in a perceived spaceless and timeless fashion. However, something timeless
15 Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience, 44.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
is perceptually placed ‘outside history’ and thus has and will always exist.
Cage’s revelation certainly brought an understanding that the sounds which
surround us are always there, regardless of our listening to them, and as such,
the background which we listen to and against is always present – but never
placed outside our personalised temporal history.
Experiencing broken sound equipment would often lead to irritation but
“it is usually broken equipment which comes to conscious attention”16 and it is
precisely this that is at the heart of Martin Heidegger’s famous tool analysis.
Heidegger discusses this with regard to being or “being-there” (dasein) in
the example of the hammer. e identity of a hammer is not dened by
its apparent visual or physical characteristics but its relationship to other
things that it references, such as nails and wood. Objects are therefore given
their identity in the context of other objects, or in the case of living things,
what they encounter and experience. More broadly, identity is constructed in
relation to the other things, meanings, perspectives and narratives that exist
in relation to it.
For Edmund Husserl, intentionality is related to the objects which lie
before the mind – the objects of our perception are objects of something: “All
perception, judgment, love, and hate is perception, judgment, love, or hate of
some object”.17 While Heidegger broke with this perspective and found the
understanding that all things that reveal themselves to us in consciousness
are only a small subset of the objects which surround us. e hammer is one
example of this. e identity of the hammer itself is only revealed to us when
it no longer functions as a hammer, while previously the hammer was an
object in and of itself and taken for granted by accomplishing the tasks which
we needed it for.
According to Heidegger, the broken hammer brings the nature of the
object itself into focus. In our interaction with the objects which surround us,
16 Graham Harman, e Quadruple Object (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 174.
17 Ibid., 173.
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only a small part of this awareness makes up our conscious interaction with
the world; for the most part objects retreat to a hidden realm, supporting
our perceptions but seldom making themselves visible.18 Heidegger’s
reference to “tools” is not limited to specic objects such as hammers, drills
or wheelbarrows: Eno’s broken speaker is indeed one such tool experience.
Unseen site
A site refers to a specic position or location. We are surrounded by objects
with a function we take for granted. When the ‘ambient’ is conceptualised as a
“surrounding tint”,19 we experience the ambient not only as something which
is all around us, but also as an ever-present entity. When faced with listening
to the ambient we are experiencing something that Eno described as a “music
to swim in, to oat in, to get lost inside”.20 is presumed immersive quality
of the music places it outside our ability to discern between the objective
and subjective space of our perception. Indeed, this immense immersive
experience disintegrates the hierarchy of foreground and background, and
with that our ability to discern some contour to the musical experience and
our surroundings which makes the experience omnipresent. e consequences
of the site of the ambient is highlighted in the work on lm sound by Michel
Chion, which indeed demonstrates that an ambient surrounding inuence is
imperative to understanding the foreground.
Our listening is inuenced and aected by something which is hidden
and Chion refers to this as the acousmêtre. e acousmêtre is an acousmatic
character, hidden from view, who creates a sense of ambiguity to the scene of a
lm. It is a character who hides “behind curtains, in rooms or hideouts”,21 and
who is implicated in the action and all the while on the verge of being part
18 Ibid., 37.
19 Brian Eno, A year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 293.
20 Ibid., 294.
21 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
of it. e powers of the acousmêtre – the cinematic gure of an audible voice
without a clearly visible body – depend on “whether or not the acousmêtre
has been seen”.22 is background, conceived in lm, is far from siteless, but
the reduction of site is tied to the abstracted nature oered by both lm and
games. e contextualizing site is acousmatic, it is hidden from view but the
sounds themselves are fundamentally of the site, as they belong to the context
from where we view and hear the foreground. e place does not need to be a
physical location, but the place as a site of understanding is the central focal
point in this mode of listening.
A listening protagonist in the acousmêtre is found in both of the two
creation myths referenced at the beginning of this chapter, always hidden
from view but present in the receiver’s consciousness. e immersive site is
no longer a protagonist who at one point or another comes into view, rather
the site itself is the protagonist and the sounds we hear are of the site. In this
way, it is something which is, and presumably always will be. Eno’s experience
of listening to an acousmatic ambience in Ghana exemplied this perfectly.23
Listening on location through headphones, and hearing an unseen nature
chorus is interpreted as an acousmatic listening experience of abstracted
sound. rough this act of becoming music, it then ceases to be music when
projected back out onto the landscape as something omnipresent.
Chion refers to ambient sound (which he also calls ‘territory sound’) as
“sound that envelops a scene and inhabits its space”24 and that does not reveal
or embody its source. Becoming music is then becoming site. By being a
background, the ambient is a now-ness, an entity which is always present.
e now-ness of the ambient in its present-ness is implicit in this immersive
experience of our surroundings. e absence of a foreground in ambient
22 Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in eory and Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 39.
23 Brian Eno, liner notes, Ambient 4: On Land (CD). (UK: EMI -Virgin Records - 50999 6 84530 2 2,
ENOCDX 8, 2009).
24 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 75.
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music immediately situates the experience of ambient music on the objects
closer to us, our own bodies, the room we are in, the relationships we have,
and the experience between us and our surroundings. But fundamentally,
listening is intentional hearing, and the relationship between the music and
our listening initiates a mode of analytic attention where the music not only
merges with non-diegetic sounds of the background, but also springs from
this background to our diegetic present-ness.
Diegetic sounds are sounds which come from a character or focus present
in the foreground, and non-diegetic sounds are from somewhere beyond the
foreground. Chion identies non-diegetic sounds as, among others, musical
underscoring25 to accompany a scene. Indeed, the interplay between these
foreground and background sounds represents a kind of self-awareness in its
present-ness. ere is never any doubt as to what we are listening to – if the
music retreats to the background but demands our intentional focus, then it
is no longer of the background but wholly in the foreground. is seemingly
simple topology is followed in the IEZA framework26 where the audio of the
ctional world of a computer game needs, on the one hand, an environment
for individual sounds and sound sources, and on the other, background
sounds that create the context for how these sounds are perceived.
e background is, as Cage and Eno both experienced, always present.
Indeed, it is inescapable: “We are surrounded by noise. And this noise
is inextinguishable. It is outside – it is the world itself – and it is inside,
produced by our living body. We are in the noises of the world, we cannot
close our door to their reception, and we evolve, rolling in this incalculable
swell”.27 is inextinguishable noise is, in Chion’s terms, the non-diegetic
part of our experience; something that exists outside the scene yet which
25 Ibid., 73.
26 Richard van Tol and Sander Huiberts, “IEZA: A framework for game audio,” accessed February 10,
2018, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3509/ieza_a_framework_for_game_audio.Php
27 Michel Serres, e Parasite (Baltimore, Maryland: e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 126.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
plays an important part in how the scene is understood. is inextinguishable
noise is what has dominated the examples presented here.
Environments and sites
Sites of listening share overlapping and intersecting narratives and
metaphors, and as ambient music is a conceptualised surrounding inuence
or tint (to paraphrase Eno), then the focus has been on the background and
our perceptions of this background. In most, if not all, acts of composition
or song-writing there is a preoccupation with the production of space, or
implied space, whether it is a large, church-like reverberance or a small,
intimate experience of being close to a singer, instrument or environment. is
creation space is strongly related to our experience of our surroundings and
in our relation to our surroundings. As such, ambience labelling information
is the classication of,
[…] information that is perceptually important but which we don’t
‘focus’ on: ‘background’. Without this background, the ‘foreground’
objects of perception don’t actually make sense, and we might regard
this background as a context for sounding objects, helping us to
discern and position them.28
e background is the context from where we read and make sense of the sounds
which surround us, be it a sick ward or an airport. e musical interpretation
is highly dependent on this environmental site as a vantage point for our
perception. Indeed, David Griesinger29 has found that the sonic background
of a performance space can have unique timbral and spatial properties, and
28 Peter Lennox, Tony Myatt, and John Vaughan, "3D audio as an information environment." In Audio
Engineering Society Conference: 19th International Conference: Surround Sound-Techniques, Technology, and
Perception. Audio Engineering Society, 2001.
29 David Griesinger, “e psychoacoustics of apparent source width, spaciousness and envelopment in
performance spaces,” Acta Acustica united with Acustica 83, no. 4 (1997): 721-731.
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this background can impose very distinct characteristics or timbral colouration
on the sound which is experienced in a space. In addition, it is our particular
spatial positioning when experiencing music that helps our understanding of
what we hear. As listeners, we try to understand our context dependent on the
perspective from which we experience our situation, by attempting to recognise
patterns and make connections between what we hear.30
ese patterns can produce a sense of ambiguity, perhaps making it dicult
to discern the direct signication of what the sounds represent in the spaces
in which we hear them. ese ambiguities carry with them implications from
the dierent contexts from where they are experienced, and the acousmatic
experience of listening from a site provides psychoacoustic descriptions
of audio environments. en we experience that “no sound event, musical
or otherwise, can be isolated from the spatial and temporal conditions of
its physical signal propagation”.31 A non-diegetic sound experience is the
experience of an acousmatic sound, a sound which carries with it some
signications of the space in which it is experienced.
In examining fundamental questions of sound in game audio, the IEZA
framework draws on Chion’s work on on-screen and o-screen sounds.
Listening is a mode and function of gathering information about the
environment we navigate, be it against a metaphorical site like an airport,
a game or lm world. In building ctional game worlds, the challenge is
to create a believable environment in which the separate sound sources can
exist and be accepted as part of the game environment. Sounds are placed
coherently within a space against a texture/background and these must exist
against the background to make sense.
e environmental and background stimuli, and the relationship of
the perceived sound to the background sound, hovers at and around the
30 Gary S. Kendall, “Meaning in electroacoustic music and the everyday mind,”Organised
Sound,15(1), (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010): 63-74.
31 Jean-FrançoisAugoyard,and HenryTorgue, eds., Sonic Experience: A guide to everyday sounds. trans.
Andrea McCartney, and David Paquette, (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2014), 4.
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a question of backgrounds: sites of listening
threshold of perception and “the listener […] accepts their symbiosis”.32 But
in attempting to be the background, to meld into this present-ness of our
perceptions, the ambient “foregrounds a devaluation of foregrounding”.33
Importantly, the background and the ambience is interpreted as music. If
the insect and bird background chorus can be understood and listened to as
music as is, then the synthesised backgrounds that exist acousmatically in
(any) site can also be music. Music, in its broadest sense can be “related to a
sense of place – landscape or environment”.34
By pertaining to belong to or be part of a landscape, the aim of such
music is ultimately to create a fully acousmatic situation, where the origins
and causes of the sounds are erased and the only thing we are left with is a
music that is.
In the psychoacoustic depictions of audio environments, listening implies
an active engagement and intention in discerning the foreground sound and
background sound. Chion divides the listening spectrum into three parts:
on-screen, o-screen and non-diegetic,35 and likewise Lennox breaks down
the shapes of our space perception to three parts: my space, adjacent space(s)
and distant space.36 e fundamental importance between these spatial
perceptions is the connections between them and how the sounds in my
space/on-screen is inuenced by the sounds of a distant/non-diegetic space.
Conclusion
For the most part, we expect things to work and when equipment ceases
to function as we expect it to, it grabs our attention. For Eno, the broken
speaker prompted listening focused on the threshold between the music and
32 Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience, 33.
33 Ibid., 33.
34 Brian Eno, liner notes, Ambient 4: On Land.
35 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 78.
36 Peter Lennox et al., 3D audio as an information-environment.
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background sounds, while for Cage the anechoic chamber did not function
as expected. Whereas Cage subjectively experienced his body’s sounds, Eno
attempted to present the work outside this sphere into a separate objectivity.
e lessons to be learned from both Cage’s ‘silent’ 4’33” and Eno’s ambient
works concern our hierarchies of listening. Our attention turns toward
the background, past the foregrounded sounding objects to create a new
foreground present in our consciousness. is new foreground creates a
new perceptual space, a depiction of an audio environment which can
encompass references to real, ctional and metaphorical sites of existence
or perception. Yet, regardless of the site in which a work is situated, it will
always be experienced in relation to the site of history and in context to
other objects that reference it or stand in some form of relation to it. A site
is not always a physical place but rather it is a process, a set of conditions and
something which has perceptual signicance. e site of the ambient belongs
intrinsically to a site present in our consciousness, and this site is present in
its reference to other things, meanings, narratives and other sites.
