7. Conclusions
Improvised ambient music creation is about making balanced musical textures that colour our inner and outer environment while giving us a calm mental space for imagination and contemplation. A balanced ambient texture can be achieved with the help of a looper pedal in an improvisational process when the performer is relaxed and fully aware of the present moment. The performer then layers together contrasting musical and sonic materials that complement each other in a slowly progressing aesthetic, where all sound elements have a unique functionality to the music. The accidental, the uncertain and the multi-dimensional character of an ambient texture further invites awareness and concentration during the creation process. By sustaining this concentration during a long improvisational process, the mind creates an interlock with the ambient texture. The mindstate is reflected as sounds, timbres, frequencies, and silences between all the elements in the texture, circulating in the air as sound waves while constantly feeding back new musical ideas into the mind of the performer. After such processes, I noticed that my mind’s attention was calmly directed to everything happening around me with my bodily movement being slower than usual. I have come to call this sensation ”the slow buzz” because of how it feels in my body. In this way an improvised ambient music creation can work as a way to aurally illustrate how the present moment is being experienced as a human being. During this artistic research this phenomenon was the most interesting aspect for me. To be able to find beauty in the way things inherently are in the present and then interpreting that sensation as sounds.
By practicing ambient music making consistently over 18 months, I have started to notice myself tuning into the natural sound environment also more frequently. If I pay attention, I can find refuge in listening to how different sounds collide with one another around me. Sometimes I can even hear ’the rule of three’ in nature when the wind moves the powder snow on the surface of a snowbank creating pleasant swells, while the halyard beats the flagpole in a high pitch clanging pattern, and the leafless rose bush rustles against a metal fence like compressed string noise from the guitar. Just like ambient music, the environmental soundscape exists in the background of our everyday attention, but when listened to carefully, depth and beauty can be found from it. Therefore, further study could be done in finding how listening to ambient music would affect the level of present moment awareness in people in their everyday surroundings, or how the slow buzz could be transferable to the audience in different live-ambient music settings.
By sharing my art to the world my wish is that people would find contentment in simplicity, clarity, and peace in this day and age of complexity, confusion and war.