ORIGINS

The musical genre “ambient” has been attracting listeners since the term was first introduced by Brian Eno in 1975 as a way to describe his own experiments with creating sonic compositions that could mix and play with the sounds of everyday life. In accord with these beginnings, ambient musical compositions continue to enhance curiosity about the spaces we inhabit while soothing our experience of otherwise hectic and stressful places, whether they be airports, automobiles, hotels or our homes.

In recent years the musical genre has expanded to include music composed to aid listeners seeking meditation or heightened awareness, sleep, focus, study, relaxation, creativity, contemplation and self-improvement.

Although it was initially more of an underground phenomenon, the musical movement has expanded. The advent of streaming platforms has extended the genre’s reach and grown its audience, to the extent that it has now become featured by all popular music subscription services. Rolling Stone reported in 2019 that Spotify playlists offering ambient music had garnered as many as 2.85 billion streams. To put this into perspective, Beyoncé and John Legend had only reached the 1.2 billion mark at that time.

Now, within the world of visual entertainment, the combination of ambient music with complementary video content is also attracting a broadening audience. YouTube videos merging imagery and music meant for meditation, relaxation and focus are now garnering hundreds of millions of views.

This could all be very exciting if it weren’t also accompanied by a problem: the music and video pairings offered on these platforms fail to reach the potential of the genre. Investigative pieces in the trade magazine MBW (Music Business Worldwide) and Rolling Stone reported that Spotify was flooding its Ambient playlists with music by “fake artists” cranking out generic, lowest-common-denominator sounds marketed for search engine optimization, an unwelcome trend that continued in the video offerings on streaming platforms. Peter Slattery reported that “some music in this vein is downright deceptive, either of noticeably low quality or having little to no connection to the given title.” Grunge.com named this promotion of mediocre content, thoughtlessly churned out to meet audience demand, “one of the biggest scandals to hit Spotify.”

Although industry-leading streaming platforms have recognized that there is an opportunity to bring in these audiences, their efforts have fallen short. In many cases, the trend of using stock sound and imagery has carried over in the jump to video streaming, with Amazon channels offering unimaginative musical content accompanied by re-licensed, re-cycled footage. In streamlining production of these audio-visual works, the platforms have missed an opportunity to deliver content that is true to the origins and spirit of the ambient genre, which was to thoughtfully create delicate works of art that invite audiences into a new kind of experience and facilitate a personal journey through sound. At a time when audience interest has never been greater, the content that is offered is missing the mark. In short, there are long-established fans of the ambient music genre whose expectations aren’t being met by this new merging of sound and video. In addition, there is a growing contingent of new fans attracted to the genre, but this potential audience has never been presented with a high quality, well-crafted offering.

In another effort to respond to this audience demand, HBO Max recently teamed up with the makers of the Calm app to produce the series A World of Calm which adapts the Calm app’s “Sleep Stories” for the small screen, combining high resolution images of aquatic life, birds in migration, or falling snow with original sonic compositions and celebrity voices that narrate the scenes in a manner intended to lull the audience toward a state of relaxed serenity.

While A World of Calm does feature top-notch production values, we believe that its use of audio narration means that it will fail to serve a large portion of the potential audience and will even intrude upon the many and varied purposes (focus, meditation, contemplation, background music) that audiences are seeking from ambient audiovisual compositions.

We believe audiences and artists will respond enthusiastically to a high quality program that preserves their freedom to choose how they relate and interact with the material; to something that respects their desire for an unmediated, personal audio-visual encounter.

The ability to choose how one engages with this immersive experience is the core defining principle of Presence.