Ambient Icon: Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’

Many years ago, Brian Eno walked into a building in Germany and felt uplifted. The building was a marvel of contemporary architecture, elegant and spacious with glass walls allowing sunlight to completely flood the interior. The building happened to be an airport.

As Eno took in the scene, there was just one thing spoiling it for him; a soundtrack of inane pop music coming through the tannoy, an irritating din completely at odds with this cathedral-like modernist space. He was astonished that despite all the attention given to the design of the building, such little thought had been spared to the soundscape within it.

What if somebody was to create music tailored specifically for this environment? This experience was the germ of an ongoing project that has continued for the rest of Eno’s life – the creation of ambient music.

Many will be familiar with the high profile parts of Eno’s career, which started with him playing keyboards with glam band Roxy Music in the seventies, and continued through collaborations with Talking Heads’ David Bryne and onto production gigs with some the biggest bands on the planet, including U2 and Coldplay.

But possibly his most influential work began with that experience in Cologne Bonn airport. Released in 1978, Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports used synthesisers and layered voices to create a sound that was calm, spacious and linear. This was music that didn’t demand your attention, but floated in and out of the consciousness, providing a soothing sonic backdrop to enhance mental clarity.

It hardly needs stating that airports are among the most stress-inducing places in modern life, and it would certainly make a difference if they were filled with calming music. 45 years on from Eno’s groundbreaking album though, this has yet to happen. Perhaps it would be seen as too radical, too wierd; or perhaps managers fear that chilled-out staff would be less efficient.

Music in the workplace has a chequered history anyway. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Muzak corporation produced blandly-cheerful piped music for corporations in order to keep people cheerful and productive. However, Muzak came to be seen as a kind of aural Prozac; a mind-numbing control tactic. Simply pumping out the latest chart hits could seem like a safer bet.

Eno’s ambient approach on ‘Music for Airports’ and other subsequent albums has been compared with the work of 20th century avant garde composers such Erik Satie. But he has also crossed the boundary into fine art, establishing a reputation for creating ‘environments’ in which his music is combined with video and light sculptures.

Although he has declared himself to be an atheist, it seems to me that Eno has made a huge contribution to the world of wellbeing, which is by most peoples’ definition at least partly spiritual. I have a playlist of instrumental tracks to aid meditation which clearly owe a debt to his work. Likewise, yoga studios and reiki practitioners often play music in a similar style, which science acknowledges can slow the pulse rate and induce feelings of calm and tranquility.

Of course, humanity has always used music to enhance meditative practices – think of Himalayan singing bowls or Japanese harp music – but electronic manipulation of sound allows for a much wider range of effects.

If we are to continue to use airports (and like it or not, they show little sign of disappearing), wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were calmer places? Get Eno on your iPod.