Sitting, listening, chilling. Music for background or foreground. Our music is for tripping, for relaxing, or for making us uneasy and challenging us with a new perspective.
At the start of the third millennium, ambient music - or music to chill-out to - makes perfect sense. As the Western world becomes faster, more complex, more rife with nervous energy, the joy of listening to instrumental music that expresses both our external environment (both man-made and natural) and our inner spaces (both emotional and mental) is now more popular than at any other time in the history of recorded sound.
The results of this are cumulative: as the relaxation music we buy becomes more and more influenced by the headphones we listen through, songs which do not sound good in earbuds have a harder time succeeding in the arena of your mind.
It was English musician, sound designer and conceptualist Brian Eno who first officially coined the phrase “ambient”. In the sleeve notes to his 1978 opus Ambient 1: Music For Airports he defines it as music "designed to induce calm and space to think". Eno's concept of ambience is music that can be either actively listened to or used as background, depending on whether the listener chooses to pay attention or not. It’s been a highly influential if not entirely original idea; at best informing the resurgence of electronic ambient via the dance world, at worst being taken to its passive extreme by many creators of "relaxation" music.
In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, and with it, there now ubiquitous earbuds. Because of the iPods documented proliferation, audiences have been popping noise into their ears through those earbuds for almost 15 years. This has had an undeniable effect on the way consumers process music, and in turn, producers craft their music.
Certainly, much new age music would be unthinkable without the synthesiser. The origins of new age date back to the 1970's on America's west coast where there arose a kind of cottage industry supported by lifestyle fairs and alternative bookshops. New age music, including the lightweight "healing" music of composers like Steve Halpern, soon became hugely popular.
But new age is as much a religious movement as it is a musical style, and therein lies its Achilles heel - a pot porri of folk psychology, theology and astrology; of enlightened thinkers and shameless hypocrites; of sincere intentions and outright charlatans. For every genuine talent from the early days of American new age music - Don Robertson, Upper Astral, Iasos, J.D. Emmanuel, Deuter, Don Slepian - there were a dozen more hacks making very bad music with nothing but therapeutic or spiritual claims to prop it up. Unfortunately, such examples sullied the entire genre. One series of meditation albums by Rudy Helm and David Kessner went so far as to claim that "music has real therapeutic value...you're purchases as such are tax deductible", prompting New York radio broadcaster John Schaefer to quip: "Wonder what the IRS thinks of that?"
Earbuds were originally designed to be economical. As such, the sound is far from perfect, or even good. The way they represent frequency is essentially off-kilter. Low frequencies require a larger mechanism to push sound waves through Air than earbuds can physically provide. Bass instruments are not the only elements to suffer in earbuds. Shamanic drums also sound less powerful.
So what producers and engineers have done, over the years, is to use all sorts of audio-chicanery to trick your ears and mind into hearing a bass sound that's fundamentally missing from your earbuds. To fool your ears into believing the bass and drum are present within the song, an engineer will manipulate the bass overtones to resonate in the midrange frequencies. Browse through Pro-audio communities such as: gearslutz, prosoundweb, and the wonderful pensado's place, and you'll find engineers around the world discussing the earbud phenomenon, and how to alter the sound of your YouTube meditation music for it.
