ABSTRACT
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. Ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman's rhetorical question echoes a common refrain in much contemporary writing on the genre of ambient music. As Mark Prendergast put it at the cusp of the 21st century, the spread of recorded media to all corners of everyday life has "rendered all recorded music, by definition, Ambient."The design-oriented analysis and genre interpretation that follows draws upon three extant frameworks for understanding recorded music production. Design-oriented analysis investigates the ways recorded sounds combine to create musical affects. The design-oriented analysis and genre interpretation that follows draws upon several extant frameworks for understanding recorded music production. Genre terms translate recorded music design's intertwining of affects and affordances in terms of musical categories, which in turn serve as malleable interpretive frameworks that organize socio-aesthetic patterns and ideologies of music production and consumption.
