Why are we so obsessed with surrounding ourselves with music?

The anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis is the “quietest place on Earth”. A room so terrifyingly silent it can drive occupants to the brink of madness. In this Minnesotan facility – used for all from testing dishwasher volumes to training astronauts to cope with the frightening noiselessness of space – boffins have taken the quest for a moment’s peace to bonkers levels.

In a steel box suspended by springs inside foot-thick concrete walls, there exists a void that kills soundwaves as effectively as Mr Muscle does kitchen germs (99.9% of them). 

At latest world-record-breaking rating in 2021, it measured a whopping -24.9 decibels. It’s so supersonically silent that people who spend time within report hearing the sounds of their own bodies – the thumping of their hearts, the rush of blood through veins. They can hear themselves blink. Within as little as 15 minutes some have reported claustrophobia, nausea and panic attacks.

The soundtrack of our mortality may be too much to bear. I have no desire to be driven insane by my gurgling guts. I just mention this because I feel the anechoic chamber is a handy device for making a point about music, and our growing societal obsession with surrounding ourselves with it, day in, day out. 

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In our pinging, bleeping, blipping, babbling, droning, ring-toning, air-podding, always-on world, are we now scared to be alone with our own silence? Are we trying to block out the terrifying fact of our existence? Or are cynical corporate forces intent on constantly pumping crummy content into our brains at it again? Let me briefly make the case for switching off once in a while. 

I read an annoying article on the BBC recently about a new growing fad for listening to ambient music as an aid to sleep, focus and relaxation. With reference to Spotify playlists called things like Deep Focus and Ambient Relaxation, the story features a bunch of young office workers who “use ambient music in different capacities”. One ritually listens to a playlist called Peaceful Retreat. Another swears by a geeky YouTube channel of Lord of the Rings-inspired audioscapes.

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Described by its godfather Brian Eno as being as “ignorable as it is interesting”, ambient music has been unobtrusively soothing ears since the 70s, and while much of it may be hippy-dippy, gong-bathy, aural hocus pocus, it has produced many classics. From Eno’s own album Apollo (1983) to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994) and recent records by the likes of Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore.  

But true art you shall not discover on Peaceful Retreat or Deep Focus. Artificial intelligence is good at making ambient music, because the emphasis on texture and atmosphere over structure makes it easy to synthesise. Delve into these Spotify playlists, and you’ll find faceless artists called Aerial Lakes or Ethereal Nocturne, some with millions of plays. Google them and they show no signs of life. I would speculate that most are AI aliases, churning out mindless background dross for easy money. If you favour this over real ambient tunes, you’re being conned.

I can perfectly recognise why many use incidental music as an aid to a balanced mind, to drown out the noisy environmental hum of everyday life. The so-called “loudness war” hasn’t helped – the volume arms race in digital music mastering, which has seen records get increasingly louder to drown out the competition (landmark offenders include Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory and Taylor Swift’s 1989). 

In the live concert sphere, I’ve seen an increasing number of artists lately doing the opposite to stand out, and go completely unamplified for a song or two. It forces fans to fall utterly silent, and creates a fleeting moment of deeper connection.  

Can extreme quiet, and indeed silence itself, be considered music? In a manner of speaking, yes. The most famous example is 4’33” by American experimental composer John Cage – a piece inspired by a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1950, and the realisation that there is no true silence. John Lennon, John Denver and Stiff Records have all released completely silent songs as acts of protest. 

More recently, the lowercase movement – a sub-genre of ambient led by artists like Steve Roden (who died in 2023), Bernhard Günter and Miki Yui – have broken new ground in almost-not-there sound, with mesmerising compositions comprising near inaudible clicks, scrapes and pops. To borrow the title of one of my favourite soothing albums by Norwegian indie-folkies Kings of Convenience: quiet is the new loud.

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