"Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious."
It's a ritual of mine to play Eno's Discreet Music during takeoff. Something about it is just so enveloping, introspective and morose and no other piece of music hits me that way. So I figure, if I'm going to die, I want it to be to Discreet Music.
sebmellen [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Mine is Burning Airlines Give You So Much More, also by Eno.
bloopernova [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thank you for sharing! I'm currently playing Discreet Music while there's lightning and thunder outside. My dog shivers with fright during bad storms and this is helping me to calm down, which in turn helps my pup.
shlant [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> It's a ritual of mine to play Eno's Discreet Music during takeoff.
Mine is Giegling Mix 07. Less ambient and more 4/4 + breakbeat but beautifully emotive. Even better during sunset
qhiliq [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks for this. I'd heard a few of the tracks on this before but the mix was a great way to start the morning.
latentcall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is mine too. This Is Not is one of if not the best mixes I’ve heard in my entire life. This and Live at Planet Uterus.
AdamN [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Perhaps the uplifting responsorial to this would be "An Ending (Ascent)" from his Apollo soundtrack.
pimeys [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I never thought to see a link to a Pitchfork Sunday review on HN. I've been reading them with my morning coffee every Sunday for years.
dmazin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
When the AI songs started happening, I've been hoping someone would make a very long version of 1/1 from Music for Airports. This is not that. I don't mean stretched out. I just mean that it gets interpolated outwards after the original composition ends.
Does anyone know what can make that?
kodomomo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Try https://play.generative.fm/browse. The endless aisatsana generator is pretty good, I'm sure there's an option that's similar to 1/1.
LeoPanthera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The Black Dog have a lovely Patreon where they personally answer comments. Have you considered asking them?
omnimus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I would say only Brian Eno can make one.
Maybe he made some other music thats continuation.
And if you happen to already have a copy of Audacity, it has an implementation of paulstretch built-in. (Certainly not as nice looking as that dedicated tool, though.)
isoprophlex [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is just excellent, it works a lot better than I thought it would. You can really drown in the song, whoa.
I'll add that there's a lot of extremely timestretched tracks from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II on youtube as well. They all sound glorious, too
jedimastert [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Paulstretch is such an utterly genius algorithm. Ridiculously simple solution to a difficult problem but it gets you amazing results
Great share, thank you! Scratches the itch of "I'd love to turn some of my beats into ambient soundscapes but don't want to spend the time".
Ylpertnodi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Less distructive, but also -the [vst3] plugin 'valhalla supermassive'.
pbmahol [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The paulxstretch completely obliterates phase component of audio input.
Its not really way to do it if you want real output.
jedimastert [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Define "real" in this instance? We're talking about audio manipulation, fiddling with time and frequency domain. Something's going to have to give
pbmahol [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are better, pro solutions, but if you want random phase what that algorithm actually does I'm not going to judge you.
wiml [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As long as you match the phase of the positive and negative frequency components you'll get real output
jm547ster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Phase is relative, you are trying to sound intelligent
colanderman [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Of a single sinusoidal component, sure, this is true. But phase differences between sonic features are absolutely detectable.
The effect is most noticeable on raw synthesized tones: sawtooth, square wave, etc. These tones contain sonic energy concentrated at discontinuities in the waveforms. The ear can hear this, as a "buzzing sound".
Run these tones through Paulstretch (even with 0 stretch), and the sonic energy is distributed throughout the wavecycle. These tones retain their spectral character, but noticeably lose the buzzing character.
I've uploaded a demo here: https://chris.pacejo.net/temp/phase.wav It is a 55 Hz sawtooth tone, alternating every 2.5 s between the raw tone, and the tone fed through Paulstretch with no stretching.
There was even a paper written on this. Laitinen, Disch & Pulkki, "Sensitivity of Human Hearing to Changes in Phase Spectrum". [1]
Paulstretch muddies up percussive transients (like hi hat strikes) as well.
Anyway it's the reason things like gammatone filters exist for analyzing audio. They reveal phase correlations in the same way the ear is able to. Windowed Fourier transforms (used by e.g. Paulstretch and Audacity for various purposes) obfuscate these relationships.
Doesn't phase only matter if you want to mix it with some other sound? If you're editing the final version you're going to be playing, what's the point in preserving phase?
colanderman [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The human ear is sensitive to phase correlation. It stems from the physiological fact that our ear is effectively a multiresolution filter. So with an overtone-rich tone, the time constant with which we perceive the uppermost harmonics is significantly less than the period of the base harmonic. So if the sonic energy of those harmonics is correlated into small "packets", we hear that as a "buzzing". This is true of raw synthesis waveforms: sawtooth, square, etc. It's also true of any short transients: clapping, hi-hats, etc.
If you "mess with" the phase information of the harmonics relative to the base harmonic, this is the same thing as changing where the sonic energy of those harmonics falls in the wavecycle. So notably, in the cases listed above where the sonic energy falls into small "packets", if you randomize that phase information relative to a much lower tone (as Paulstretch does), you now have spread that energy throughout the full wavecycle. This eliminates any sensation of "buzzing" or "clicking" and makes transients "mushy".
pbmahol [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You can not just preserve original phase when doing time stretching, there are "smarter" algorithms that try to derive "correct" phase, while the paulxstretch just make it random values, maybe for extreme stretching values it doesn't matter for ambient music but for general music and sounds its not that trivial.
itomato [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There is some signature compression that comes with paulstretch that sounds exactly like the output of a square wave interpolated to a sine.
You can see, hear and almost taste it if you stretch white noise.
Tonality makes no difference.
keyle [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Mind blown. Thanks!
barrenko [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ah yes, pop some ketamine, turn this one, and never return.
The Black Dog's "Music for Photographers" is probably my favorite album of all time. Yet it's almost completely unknown. Everyone should give it a listen.
morsch [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I like that one a lot, too. But it's not the kind of music a lot of people like. You'll get mostly blank or concerned looks if you make everyone listen to it.
mrmagpie [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The High-Rise Living 78-86 mix with Regis is stunning too
madmoose [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Music for Real Airports is one of the albums I put on to block out the world when I’m trying to get work done.
Mistletoe [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks for introducing me to this. This is the kind of music I like and had never heard of it.
tomduncalf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ah yeah love this album!
matteason [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If anyone would like to play with something more interactive, I'm testing out some new effects on Ambiphone, my ambient soundscape web app. The test version is at https://test.ambiph.one
There's a basic playback speed control now (basic in as much as it doesn't preserve pitch) plus things like reverb and delay effects
(Audio may be a little glitchy on Android Chrome if you have lots of sounds playing - I'm debugging that at the moment)
aloifran [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hey thank you for sharing your project! I am really enjoying using it while working at home.
A quick observation, the link to share a mix for the birthday is not clickable cause the save menu is clicked instead (yes I'm a QA Engineer). Great feature to save mixes!
cypherpunks01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Deconstructing Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports:
It's a must-read! It has analysis of all Eno's tape loops and an interactive note randomizer. Mentioned in the article's related content but it's worth an extra shout.
Fun to play around with for anyone who likes the album or ambient music in general.
ddxv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For anyone else perusing the comments for more ambient music, I recommend Stars of the Lkd for anyone looking for similar feels.
also here to mention stars of the lid. I just found out about them and they're great. on the same youtube binge I also learned about Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and have become fascinated with their work as well
It seems like the website is region locked?
I haven't seen an 405 error mentioning a specific country yet though, it seemed interesting.
https://imgur.com/a/AiY9xMJ
jvdvegt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No problem here from The Netherlands... I wonder what's so specific about Slovenia.
Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) just made a worthwhile documentary about Eno: https://www.hustwit.com/eno
It's only streaming right now and each streamed version is unique, riffing off of Eno's "generative" music.
lend000 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If you like Brian Eno's music, you might enjoy Hiroshi Yoshimura. Wet Land is one of my favorite albums of all time.
sebmellen [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Only on HN do we get these great music recommendations.
andyjohnson0 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I bought Bang On A Can's version soon after it was released in 97, and it remains one of my favourite pieces of music to code to. For reasons that I can't adequately explain I prefer it to the (itself wonderful) original.
tra3 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well I know what I’m listening to at work tomorrow. Wonder if this is going to make my code happier or sadder.
Also now wondering if there’s any research on how music affects (cognitive) performance.
flowerthoughts [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I heard of a study many years ago that concluded that listening to music you like made you drive your car a bit faster, regardless of the pace of your preferred music. Not sure that translates to cognitive performance, but might suggest listening to music at the gym is useful.
djmips [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Your code will no longer be afraid of crashing.
chaosprint [3 hidden]5 mins ago
sounds like paulstretch is heavily used. you can get similar results when applying this to almost any sont.
cage433 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For those who find this finishes all too quickly, before it really gets started, here's Igor Levit's performance of Satie's Vexations
Interesting bit there about music for facing mortality. An ambient classic from that same era is Steve Roach “Structures from Silence”. He had an NDE and that music is what he heard during.
jqr- [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> NDE
Near-death experience. For those (like me) unfamiliar with the acronym.
kryptonomist [3 hidden]5 mins ago
One great musician to listen to during late coding sessions.
mykowebhn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Or, on Thursday afternoons, you can listen to one of my favorites
I heard this music off on for decades, but couldn’t place it. I doubled down and only having a memory of it I was certain it was by Brian Eno.
It took me a while to stumble upon it, it was music written for an ITV Science programme’s April Fool’s episode; which due to strike action was delayed until July.
This comes up repeatedly with regards to conspiracy theories, I assume not by people who think the Moon landings are a hoax, that would be insane. Erm wait a minute…
anal_reactor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
God is this annoying. How can I listen to music where a single note stretches longer than my window of attention? My mind perceives this the same way as the sound of my fridge working, except much louder.
Fun fact: it seems to be somewhere around 33 beats per minute that people lose the connection between one beat and the next and therefore lose the ability to perceive rhythm. Though oddly enough this video asserts that and then immediately disproves it by having a band play a 33 BPM song while the audience counts along.
mistrial9 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
great to visit with Eno at his long-time music machine installation at the Palace of Fine Arts SF, so long ago.. a real artist!
gherard5555 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Alternative title: Journalist discover the paulstretch software
Synaesthesia [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not really necessary. So little happens in the original (in a good way)
HN.zip
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brian-eno-ambient-1-mus...
Mine is Giegling Mix 07. Less ambient and more 4/4 + breakbeat but beautifully emotive. Even better during sunset
Does anyone know what can make that?
Maybe he made some other music thats continuation.
For anyone curious how to produce something that sounds like this, paulstretch is the way to do it. https://sonosaurus.com/paulxstretch/
My personal favorite use of this: https://youtu.be/XiKWfcy-Z70?si=iJTP0XTEAAObI_rU
The effect is most noticeable on raw synthesized tones: sawtooth, square wave, etc. These tones contain sonic energy concentrated at discontinuities in the waveforms. The ear can hear this, as a "buzzing sound".
Run these tones through Paulstretch (even with 0 stretch), and the sonic energy is distributed throughout the wavecycle. These tones retain their spectral character, but noticeably lose the buzzing character.
I've uploaded a demo here: https://chris.pacejo.net/temp/phase.wav It is a 55 Hz sawtooth tone, alternating every 2.5 s between the raw tone, and the tone fed through Paulstretch with no stretching.
There was even a paper written on this. Laitinen, Disch & Pulkki, "Sensitivity of Human Hearing to Changes in Phase Spectrum". [1]
Paulstretch muddies up percussive transients (like hi hat strikes) as well.
Anyway it's the reason things like gammatone filters exist for analyzing audio. They reveal phase correlations in the same way the ear is able to. Windowed Fourier transforms (used by e.g. Paulstretch and Audacity for various purposes) obfuscate these relationships.
Aside: please try to avoid snarky armchair dismissals on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "you are trying to sound intelligent" does not advance discourse.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ville-Pulkki/publicatio...
If you "mess with" the phase information of the harmonics relative to the base harmonic, this is the same thing as changing where the sonic energy of those harmonics falls in the wavecycle. So notably, in the cases listed above where the sonic energy falls into small "packets", if you randomize that phase information relative to a much lower tone (as Paulstretch does), you now have spread that energy throughout the full wavecycle. This eliminates any sensation of "buzzing" or "clicking" and makes transients "mushy".
You can see, hear and almost taste it if you stretch white noise.
Tonality makes no difference.
There's a basic playback speed control now (basic in as much as it doesn't preserve pitch) plus things like reverb and delay effects
Here's some slowed-down ambient music: https://test.ambiph.one/?m=1-Slow+Realisation-ap50a25c60
And a cat purring at 50% speed makes a pretty convincing lion: https://test.ambiph.one/?m=1-Lion's+Den-aa8a34c60e37f100ac50...
(Audio may be a little glitchy on Android Chrome if you have lots of sounds playing - I'm debugging that at the moment)
https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-musi...
It's a must-read! It has analysis of all Eno's tape loops and an interactive note randomizer. Mentioned in the article's related content but it's worth an extra shout.
Fun to play around with for anyone who likes the album or ambient music in general.
https://youtu.be/c4E6RO4muLU?si=6QbUatQXm0zzWy0N
https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCeYcG8gnFjGA5lUShHsz3yQ
But the site is mostly a link to this 6 hour track: https://youtu.be/ZWUlLHv7-64
For fans of the film Heat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHP4qbgAN6s One of my absolute favorites to work to.
It's only streaming right now and each streamed version is unique, riffing off of Eno's "generative" music.
Also now wondering if there’s any research on how music affects (cognitive) performance.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Uu_03mUPgHU?si=ggJYSJH8SUy0AcKO
Near-death experience. For those (like me) unfamiliar with the acronym.
https://youtu.be/TTHF2Dfw1Dg?si=PKvJpnG88hjV2-St
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9AldyuIh5A
I heard this music off on for decades, but couldn’t place it. I doubled down and only having a memory of it I was certain it was by Brian Eno.
It took me a while to stumble upon it, it was music written for an ITV Science programme’s April Fool’s episode; which due to strike action was delayed until July.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3
This comes up repeatedly with regards to conspiracy theories, I assume not by people who think the Moon landings are a hoax, that would be insane. Erm wait a minute…
Fun fact: it seems to be somewhere around 33 beats per minute that people lose the connection between one beat and the next and therefore lose the ability to perceive rhythm. Though oddly enough this video asserts that and then immediately disproves it by having a band play a 33 BPM song while the audience counts along.