Immunological atmospheres: Ambient music and the design of self-experience

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural popularity of ‘ambient music’ playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and the modulation of affect in some of the media environments of contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names a style of non-intrusive, gentle background music designed to assist the listener in relaxing or focussing on work. At the centre of the paper is the argument that ambient music demonstrates how the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. Developing this argument, the paper advances two claims. First, drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, that ambient music exemplifies the ‘immunological’ character of atmospheric envelopment. Second, that ambient music points towards the role of digital technologies capable of supporting new atmospheric envelopments as facilitating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘investments of desire’, new conjunctions between flows of information, behaviours, value and affects that are central to the processes of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the paper speculates on ambient music in its relation to the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies.

Introduction

Type the word ‘ambient’ into the search bar of a streaming platform such as YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music today and one will be confronted with a seemingly limitless array of mostly long-form playlists or videos, many with play counts rising into the millions, that advertise background music to help the listener relax or concentrate on other tasks. This ‘ambient music’ is, by design, unremarkable. It is music that inserts itself in the background of everyday experience, a subtle, diffuse atmospheric presence to filter out unwanted distractions and to stabilise unsettled thoughts. In its construction of embryonic space-times of gentle rhythm and nondescript melody, ambient music posits itself as an emblem of thoughtful tranquillity, of harmony and order, and thus of a recuperation of individual capacities to act. In the words of composer and musicologist David Toop, ambient music aims ‘to cool the brows of overheated urban info-warriors’, acting as a panacea for the disorientation that characterises the postmodern experience of self. ¹ The idea is that the music delineates an atmosphere, sets a mood, and the listener enveloped within begins to enjoy a newly found feeling of assurance in their surroundings.

Drawing on cultural geographic theorisations of atmospheres as diffuse backgrounds that condition thought and action, and in particular on recent work analyzing how atmospheres are designed and architected in various ways, ² in this article I want to examine the cultural popularity of ambient music as a paradigm of the fabrication of atmospheres for affect modulation in the media environments of contemporary capitalism. At the centre of the paper is the argument that the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. The experience of atmospheric envelopment afforded by ambient music, I will suggest, points towards the formation of a new proxemics, a new means of orienting oneself in and towards the world, one that is made possible by the specific capabilities of contemporary media technologies. It thus highlights how the affective tonality of our personal spheres is increasingly open to technical design in ways that we often take for granted but that represents in fact the production of new regimes of sociality and collective desire. I develop two claims to elucidate this argument.

My first claim, which draws to some extent on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, ³ is that the quasi-therapeutic character of ambient music’s atmospheres expresses a logic of envelopment whose function is to fabricate liveable spaces amidst a world that is often perceived to be threatening or otherwise potentially harmful. As such, ambient music can be conceptualised in its capacity to generate what I will term here immunological atmospheres. These are atmospheres designed to generate protective experiential space-times, envelopments whose function is to isolate and defend against unwanted sensory intrusions. Such atmospheres scaffold idiosyncratic ways of thinking about self and world, expressing a defensive orientation towards the contemporary social sphere and its intensified claims to our attention and our affects. By examining such a process in the context of Sloterdijk’s suggestion that ours in the Western world is an epoch characterised by fragmentation and atomisation, I highlight the significance of ambient music in demonstrating how today’s media environments constitute the conditions for the forms of self-experience that inform the ongoing (re)production of social life. ⁴

The second claim builds on the first by examining the specifically mass-cultural appeal of ambient music’s immunological atmospheres. Concretely, this requires accounting for the fact that such atmospheres are inseparable from the capitalism of digital media streaming platforms. Here I reject a style of critique that would render ambient music listeners as passive victims of ideological deception: the claim, in other words, that the calming atmospheres of ambient music are simply an elaborate ruse that masks the exploitation of listeners in new ways. ⁵ I argue that such concerns about the reach of capitalistic processes into the intimate terrain of human moods and subjective states are better served by conceptualising what I will term, after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, investments of desire. ⁶ This is a process, in this case, in which digital media technologies facilitate new conjunctions between flows of technical knowledge, consumer preference, capital and more, such that listeners are conceived as actively investing their libidinal energy in the production of surplus value. Ambient music thus exemplifies how the modifications of mood and tonality offered by contemporary media environments involve their users in processes of capitalistic valorisation in ways that are irreducible to structural epiphenomena.

The paper unfolds by first outlining key characteristics of recent scholarship on atmospheres, focussing in particular on work that documents and theorises design interventions in atmospheres. Second, the paper situates ambient music within this work as a technique of atmospheric envelopment intrinsic to contemporary media environments. The paper then moves to unpack the two claims made above in turn, focussing on ambient music as immunological in its effects on self-experience and then as inseparable from broader flows of desire that link such atmospheres with the processes of digital media economies. One thing I want to make clear before beginning here is that though I am writing towards a general sense of the human as it emerges within engagements with media technologies, the critical orientation of the article is towards the ambient music listener as what Deleuze and Guattari call the figure of the ‘major’: ⁷ in this case the privileged Western capitalist subject. I conclude by drawing out the implications of thinking with ambient music for geographic understandings of atmosphere, arguing for the conceptual potential of ambient music for interrogating the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies.

Affective design: geographies of atmospheric interventions

What is an atmosphere? At its broadest, human geographic understandings of atmospheres can be situated within the context of wider efforts within and beyond the discipline to conceptualise the persistence of forms of life outside of the classic terms that would separate the individual deliberative subject from their surrounding milieux. The notion of atmosphere, in this context, becomes a useful way of bringing to the foreground something of the means by which thought and behaviour are shaped and influenced by the conditions from which they emerge. ⁸ As Ben Anderson and James Ash put it, attending to atmospheres is a means to ‘explicate the background of life and thought without presuming that the background is simply an inert ‘context’ or that the background is a mysterious, inaccessible substance outside of all mediation’. ⁹ Such work advances a number of theoretical frameworks and turns to a diversity of empirical concerns; ¹⁰ as such, it is perhaps best approached as a series of endeavours that render explicit, in some way, the conditioning force of atmospheres. Three key characteristics of such efforts are worth noting.

The first revolves around the turn to affect as an important concept for understanding thought and action outside of the terms of the deliberative subject. ¹¹ Here atmosphere becomes a conceptual shorthand for foregrounding the diffuse yet palpable intensities of space-times in their affective power to impress upon bodies in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways. ¹² The second characteristic is a concern with materiality and especially the attempt to conceive matter in such a way that does not confine it to an ontologically distinct category to the immaterial realm of ideas, values and sensibilities. The notion of atmosphere speaks to such concerns because it folds together the material and the expressive, designating as it does both a material substrate (the elemental compounds of the earth’s atmosphere, for instance) and a more immaterial quality of experience (in the way one might speak of a heightened atmosphere of a space). Insisting on the inseparability of both senses of the term, geographers have analysed atmospheres of experience in their relation to specific configurations of matter, ¹³ infrastructure ¹⁴ and technicity. ¹⁵ Atmospheres, such work contends, thus point towards a form of non-reductive or ‘incorporeal’ materialism. ¹⁶

Third, and crucially, such work exhibits an attention towards the analysis of design and architectural interventions in atmospheres that aim towards the modification of human behaviours and subjectivities. These interventions can often be subtle, as in attending to the layout of furniture and ornaments in a home, ¹⁷ experimenting with the play of light and shadow in urban environments, ¹⁸ orchestrating surveillance architecture in a train station ¹⁹ or organising artistic reconfigurations of public spaces. ²⁰ Such interventions shape the atmospheres that ‘form part of the ubiquitous backdrop of everyday life’ ²¹ and in doing so attempt to effectuate strategic outcomes in terms of mood and behaviour on a level that is barely perceptible for those within. ²² Such studies attest to Nigel Thrift’s argument that what we in the West are witnessing today is ‘the rise of an art of writing suggestible environments, environments which are able to catch and amplify mood in the manner of gardens, allowing us to bathe in an affective ether of signs and thus produce an intensified everyday’. ²³ In Thrift’s work, notably, such atmospheric interventions are understood as key aspects of a logic of seduction by which the affective becomes instrumentalised in the design of the urban spaces of capitalism. Such interventions also therefore raise questions about power and agency, about the distributed, complex and often-invisible operations shaping society in the 21st century. To this end, geographers have examined atmospheric interventions as techniques of governance, regulation and policing. ²⁴

What such work calls us to witness is a modern tendency towards what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘explication’: namely, the unfolding, the rendering public, through design and intervention, of the previously taken-for-granted conditions that shape the kinds of worlds in which we live. ²⁵ In what follows, I want to introduce ambient music as a means for extending such accounts, highlighting how the affordances of contemporary media devices allow for sound to become operationalized in the fabrication of personalized atmospheric enclosures. Importantly, the streaming of ambient music as a kind of non-intrusive but allegedly therapeutic background atmosphere for sleep, work or study, demonstrates that the ‘art of writing suggestible environments’ that Thrift identifies above is today not just the domain of planners, designers, architects and corporations; instead, with the advent of new personal media technologies, such an art increasingly extends to the prosthetic actions of individuals in their everyday technical milieux. This reflects a subtle shift in the almost decade-and-a-half since Thrift’s suggestive allusion to a burgeoning regime of atmospheric governance, a shift concerning capacities for the production of designed affect, capacities which today proliferate in new ways. Indeed, ambient music’s popularity exemplifies how developments in media technologies mean atmospheres more than ever are, to borrow a phrase from media theorist Mark Hansen, being ‘brought into the open and made accessible through recent developments in technical distribution’. ²⁶ Consequently, it is less the case today that atmospheric intervention is large in scale and mainly the domain of ‘the rich and powerful’, as Thrift previously argued. ²⁷ Instead, what must be understood are the means by which atmospheres involve us in forms of socio-spatial life at the much more intimate level of collective desires and habitualised practices of affect modulation. What follows below, then, is an attempt to elucidate the consequences of this shift, to explicate how it not only facilitates new imaginaries concerning the relation between self and world, but also how this shift inevitably produces new frontiers of capitalistic valorisation.

Ambient music’s intimate microspheres

The cover image for the album Natural Peace ²⁸ shows a side-on shot of a person lying on their back, their head resting on a pillow, eyes closed, with a conspicuous white ear bud placed within the ear, from which a white cable trails down the body, presumably connected to a mobile phone or other device for music playback that lies out of sight. In the background, floating in the sky above the figure, is a generic picture of snow-capped mountains with an aurora borealis effect visible in the sky at the very top of the image. Here is a person immersed in their own contemplative and peaceful atmosphere of sound and thought. The same image appears reproduced on a number of other albums – with names such as Call Piano, Ground Rituals, Water State, Free Now, Reflections Drone and Hypnotic True ²⁹ – credited to the artist ‘Ambient Music Sleep Therapy’. These albums all exist exclusively on the streaming platform Spotify and are compilations of largely gentle, unobtrusive music with a quiet and broadly ‘relaxing’ feel to it and track titles like ‘Gentle Mind’, ‘Tranquil Soul’, ‘Healing Night’ and so on: titles that suggest music designed to facilitate insular experiences, to allow the listener to exist, like the figure depicted on the cover image, in their own comforting micro-world, their own nurturing atmosphere removed from the distractions of an intrusive external environment.

The album – and many others like it – is exemplary of a style of ambient music that has become increasingly popular over the last decade. Generally viewed as a type of atmospheric background sound, ambient music is intended to be used for instrumental purposes: as a quasi-therapeutic ‘tint’ to an environment that can effectuate a sense of focus, relaxation or mood enhancement. ³⁰ It can be described quite well using McCormack’s definition of affective atmosphere as something ‘that registers in and through sensing bodies while also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’. ³¹ In David Toop’s genealogy of the genre Ocean of Sound, ³² he argues that, historically, ambient is a product of developments in Western music of the 20th Century that saw a turn towards introspective, contemplative sounds that, precisely in their airy diffuseness, demanded less attention from listeners. Toop cites influences such as Claude Debussy’s work and particularly the appropriation of Javanese gamelan music therein, as well as Eric Satie’s ‘furniture music’, for the way they constitute music to be heard rather than actively listened to, a space to be inhabited as much as a sound to be enjoyed. The paradigmatic work that inaugurated ambient as a proper name, as Toop tells it, was Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, ³³ which, in its famously manifesto-like liner notes, declares that ‘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’. ³⁴ Toop’s analysis of this lineage, it must be noted, is largely celebratory. He foregrounds the experimentalism of such an approach to composition against the backdrop of the chaotic upheavals of cultural fragmentation and the disorienting effects of the communications revolution of the last hundred years, an approach in which, he argues, sound was ‘used to find meaning in changing circumstances, rather than imposed as a familiar model on a barely recognisable world’. ³⁵

While such historical context is useful insofar as it demonstrates that styles of music intended as a subtle atmospheric presence are not, in themselves, entirely new, it is important to note the changes to the conditions of possibility for such styles that have come to the fore in today’s world of what Anahid Kassabian calls ‘ubiquitous listening’. ³⁶ Here, streaming technologies have enabled a different, less attentive but more continuous mode of music consumption, and audio streaming as a continuous background soundtrack to personal life replaces the notion of music as the remit of discrete listening events. ‘Whether at work, home, the mall, the gym, on the bus or in the car’, writes Paul Allen Anderson, what this context of ubiquitous listening now means is that ‘web-connected subjects live and weave among an array of streaming platforms for algorithmic or curated musical moodscapes and affective atmospheres’. ³⁷ In a recent reflection on these developments, Toop writes that what ‘ambient music’ means today is often something quite different from the 20th Century music that influenced it: the highly visible, platform-based version of ambient music of today, Toop argues, doubles down on sound as mood regulating tool, striving to exist as more of a ‘design feature’ than a musical object, a ‘functional asset to well-being, an optimisation or facilitation of a thoughtful, tranquil approach to life’. ³⁸

There are a number of key characteristics that such music shares: an emphasis on major or pentatonic scales; a very reduced ‘minimalist’ sound palette; a lack of harmonic complexity; no lyrics and often very simplified, sparse melodies; no percussion, or at the most a very subtle use of percussion; a tendency towards ‘organic’ sounds, where the music is often pared with nature recordings; heavy use of reverb that gives the music an expansive, dreamy feel. A quick look through Spotify’s ‘Browse’ function, for example, highlights many playlists of such music: the ‘Ambient Relaxation’ playlist (description: ‘Relax and unwind with chill, ambient music’), is made up of 15 hours’ worth of music defined by slowly unfurling synthesiser chords and nondescript melodies, often combined with inconspicuous sounds of rainfall or static, the whole thing heavily processed through reverb effects. ³⁹ Musically there are no sudden or unexpected shifts, and the songs tend to blend into each other without much notice. It is also, seemingly, very popular: at the time of writing the playlist has just under 1 million followers.

To some extent, as a means of affective self-regulation, ambient music can be viewed as part of a longer history of the practical use of music and sound in the reproduction of everyday life. ⁴⁰ Most famously with the case of Muzak, but also with the broader trend from the latter half of the 20th century onwards towards the broadcasting of programmed music playlists within work and retail environments, sound has frequently been mobilised in ways that capitalise on its intimate linkage with human moods. ⁴¹ Different musical styles and syntaxes have long been deployed to highlight or mask particular aspects of an environment, conditioning the ‘vibe’ of a home, shop, office or factory. And yet only with the advent of the flexible, passive and personalised ubiquitous listening experience of streaming platforms does this self-regulating capacity of sound become quite so continuous, widespread and individualised. Indeed, the difference between today’s ambient music and previous phenomena like Muzak is not only a matter of the respective aesthetic palettes of the music in question; more importantly, it is a matter of their different experiential qualities and their cultural effects. Whereas Muzak aimed to enliven a collective space by blanketing it in generically ‘feel-good’ sounds, and was underwritten by the crude psychology of ‘stimulus progression’, ⁴² in its current platform-based iteration ambient music uses sound to engineer a space of withdrawal and recuperation that is more personal than collective, an intimate experiential sphere of self-belonging. This aim is often reflected in album and playlist titles and descriptions, where ambient music is discursively constructed as a response to the increasingly busy, increasingly noisy landscapes of contemporary life. Ambient music, as such, posits itself as a type of minor therapeutic for postmodern alienation: a means, as Anderson puts it, ‘for building permeable microclimates or microspheres of mood within which individual users attempt to manage their diverse portfolios of resilience, hope, optimism, and self-efficacy’. ⁴³

Immunological atmospheres

Perhaps what is most interesting about ambient music for the atmospheres paradigm in human geography, then, is that it names the endeavour by which the atmospheric conditions of human experience become an explicit object of experimentation and design through the artistic use of sound. As an artistic approach and as a popular aesthetic experience it deals in nothing other than what McCormack terms ‘processes of fabricated envelopment’; ⁴⁴ its role is to construct an internal space amenable to thought and action. How might we grasp the affective power of sound in this process? In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari depict a scene that captures the expressive capacities of something as seemingly insignificant as a child’s song in remediating an unruly environment:

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. ⁴⁵

In fact, the subsequent passage could well anticipate the popularity of ambient soundscapes in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-mobile societies:

The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. [. . .] Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). ⁴⁶

The key thing here is in raising the question as to the techniques by which we humans come to artificially construct inhabitable space-times within a world that doesn’t always make it easy for us. The singing, the humming, the turning on of the radio and television mirror this technique of fabricating atmospheric enclosures in sound with their stabilisation of a precarious environment in a way designed to improve an individual’s affective sensibility. Ambient music, with its generation of a calming and stabilising centre in the heart of a teeming world, exemplifies precisely such a battle against forces of chaos that plays out as the practical arrangement of relations apposite to ‘a task to fulfil or a deed to do’.

Deleuze and Guattari evoke such scenes to conceptualise the territorialising function of expressive processes that they call refrains, a process that captures the dance between chaos and consistency and so the continuity and change of things in relation to their environments. Sloterdijk, on the other hand, argues for a more fundamentally defensive understanding of practices of atmospheric envelopment like these. Sloterdijk suggests that atmospheric envelopment has an immunising function. In a critique aimed more squarely at the phenomenal texture of life in the contemporary world, Sloterdijk argues that in the Western world our experience of self is characterised by a proliferation of such immunological practices and so defined by a ‘modern art of isolation’. ⁴⁷ Over the three volumes of his Spheres project, ⁴⁸ Sloterdijk advances the thesis that, in the absence of a holistic model of social cohesion, the fractured landscape of today’s globalised world brings about the situation in which we humans increasingly occupy ourselves with the creation of ‘supportive microclimates’, ⁴⁹ intimate atmospheres that provide the immune scaffoldings that remediate a disorienting and potentially hostile world. Especially pertinent here is the third volume, Foams, in which Sloterdijk studies developments in architectural design and engineering that are producing insulating envelopments of increasingly small volume. These are envelopments that ‘act back on the inhabitants themselves’ in effectuating modes of sociality peculiar to the contemporary world – pointedly, for instance, the growth in apartment living over previous, more collective forms of inhabitation. ⁵⁰ One significant thing about ambient music is therefore that it names the entering of these micro-immunological imaginaries into the artistic sphere of music and its popular consumption. In listening to ambient music, an individual delineates a protective envelopment in sound, one that shores up the body’s surroundings and summons its powers by diminishing the body’s vulnerability to being affected by unpredictable and unwanted encounters. In doing so, ambient music creates a highly insulated atmosphere that becomes for the modern person, as Sloterdijk argues of such immunological practices, ‘the body extension that provides a specific representation of their habitualized self-concern and backgrounded defensiveness’. ⁵¹

Understood as the production of immunological atmospheres, ambient music therefore presents the social and cultural sciences with a more provocative set of questions than simply acting as a means to ‘control the rhythms of daily life’, as previous studies of personal media technologies in everyday life have suggested. ⁵² Indeed, more philosophically, the key thing about such immunological practices for Sloterdijk is in spotlighting the technical constitution of particular ways of being human. We humans fabricate the microclimates, the atmospheric conditions, that recursively constitute our contemporary self-experience. The important point here is therefore that immunological practices of atmospheric envelopment like ambient music are not simply minor details of an extant social field but more fundamentally shape the perceptions of self and world that inform who we as social beings are; they frame the local anxieties, obsessions and predilections through which we relate to each other. Crucially then, Sloterdijk’s claim that our spheres of envelopment are increasingly small in volume means he argues that we increasingly do not relate to each other, or, at least, that we relate to each other in dissonant ways, immersed as we are within what he describes – with some contempt – as the ‘pampering’ effect of our isolated ‘capsules’, ‘islands’ or ‘hothouses’. ⁵³ Here, one might not share Sloterdijk’s rather dismissive attitude towards contemporary immunological practices. It is a posture that, for me at least, comes too close to a nostalgic appeal for a less mediated form of human sociality. ⁵⁴ Nonetheless, as a diagnostic tool it does at least give us pause to consider what the immunizing function might signal for understanding the modes of self-experience and the cultural forms with which ambient music is associated.

As a way of exemplifying what this kind of recursively constituted form of self-experience might look like in the context of ambient music then we might, as Mack Hagood suggests, think of Orpheus, the figure of Greek mythology. ⁵⁵ By playing the lyre and singing, Orpheus drowned out the fatal lure of the Sirens’ song, thus enveloping the Argonauts in a protected sonic atmosphere and granting them safe passage on their voyage for the Golden Fleece. In his fabrication of an immunological atmosphere through sound that defends him and his companions against unwanted incursions from the social world, Orpheus, as Hagood demonstrates, provides an analogy for the particular ways of being in the world that emerge through a range of contemporary sonic media technologies such as noise cancelling headphones, white-noise generators, apps for tinnitus treatments and even ‘nature sound’ playlists. In doing so, the mythological narrative spotlights a mode of thought expressed in the use of sonic media as affective autoregulation, one that is suspicious of externality and that regards the social world as so many ‘noxious combinations of material and immaterial bodies that leave subjects feeling ‘poisoned’ or unable to act’. ⁵⁶ The image it captures is of the ambient music listener as a heroic individual, a neoliberal vision of personal agency and triumph against the vaguely defined toxicity of external others. More pointedly perhaps, it represents the redefinition of notions of intimacy in an era of chaotic informational interconnectivity: ambient music presents a medium of withdrawal, emplacing its listener in an isolated atmosphere of harmony and order at a remove from external demands. It thus coincides with the emergence of ‘a time that swears by elementary particles and individuals’. ⁵⁷ The image suggests that practices of atmospheric envelopment through personalised media technologies might work to structure and reinforce a version of individualism that disavows the social relations that are its own condition of possibility. ⁵⁸

Investments of desire

Where the previous section outlined what could be termed the ‘phenomenality’ of ambient music’s immunological atmospheres, here I want to turn in more detail to their situatedness within the conditions of capitalistic economies. Indeed, atmospheres, though diffuse, though distributed, do not appear from nowhere; in the case of ambient music these atmospheres are grounded, broadly, in the context of contemporary capitalist regimes of production, where subjectivity, moods and behaviours are as marketable as goods and services, but also, more specifically, in the 21st-Century ubiquitous listening context afforded by streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music. As David Bissell points out in a study of on-demand food delivery platforms, digital platforms like these are engineering new kinds of affective experience in the pursuit of new modalities of consumer behaviour. ⁵⁹ This observation builds on theories of affective economies and cognitive capitalism that demonstrate the industrialisation of affective experience in the digital era, ⁶⁰ importantly in this case pointing towards the powerful role played by digital platforms in contemporary economies.

With the case of ambient music, the production of ‘tranquil’ atmospheres is inseparable from the distracted mode of perception afforded by streaming technologies. This is a mode of perception that facilitates frictionless consumption as well as the maximal production of user data. In a polemical critique, Paul Rekret thus argues that the experience of tranquillity afforded by ambient music atmospheres functions for the streaming platform ‘as a means of surveilling and modulating user cognition and, equally, [as a means] to keep the user within proprietary space so that value can continue uninterrupted’. ⁶¹ For Rekret, ambient music is therefore absorbed by ‘Culture Industries’-style critique that renders it a mass-cultural vehicle for engineering social passivity in the capitalist economy, its tranquil atmospheres complicit in the pacification of mass society. Ambient music, Rekret suggests, names the situation ‘where consumption and production become interminable and where the ultimate point is to tether the body to the machine’. ⁶²

Such a lens raises pertinent questions about the structural politics of the immunological atmospheres of ambient music in its guise as an experience for the streaming platform subscriber. Questions like, ‘who is profiting? how are the listeners being exploited in new ways?’. Importantly though, the question such a lens cannot answer is arguably the most significant one: ‘why is it popular?’. Indeed, while such a macropolitical lens helps us understand the inseparability of ambient music’s atmospheres from their material-economic conditions, in remaining oriented around a ‘Culture Industries’-style critique it makes no space for the possibility – which is actually the reality – that a mass culture phenomenon like ambient music is successful because people genuinely desire it, and that they do so without false consciousness or alienation or any such term for ideological ignorance.

The question ambient music’s atmospheres demand we ask instead is therefore ‘what is it in that listener that wants to listen to it, that actively desires the experience of envelopment it affords?’. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a theory of social organisation based on flows of desire, and in so doing they offer a means through which to understand something of the way desire functions to invest us in practices and behaviours within the contemporary capitalistic sphere. ⁶³ In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the ‘social landscape’ is thoroughly ‘invested by desire’ such that we are to see all ways of thinking and living, all our interests and pleasures, our values and morals, as fundamentally products of flows of desire. ⁶⁴ Such an approach immediately renders the cultural popularity of ambient music something more complex than personal taste for, as Janae Sholtz argues, it ‘calls us to consider how what we take to be the most personal is first and foremost impersonal, how the most intimate is the collective and social’. ⁶⁵ It also, however, renders the cultural popularity of ambient music something different to a structural epiphenomenon of capitalist production. This is because the crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument is that the political economy of the organisation of labour and consumption and the libidinal economy of flows of desire are one and the same thing. The nuance here is the suggestion that we therefore ‘analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres’ ⁶⁶ in order to understand the simultaneous constitution of a desiring subject and a regime of economic production. So, what this means here is that the subject who desires to be immersed in the gentle atmospheres of ambient music and thus finds themselves consuming the kind of playlists or music mixes exemplified above must be understood not as an individual who exercises their decision-making capacities freely and outside of all conditioning, nor as an ideologically ‘duped’ consumer, but as a functional node-point in a much broader ‘desiring-machine’ that works by forging new conjunctions, new investments of desire, across the social field.

This is not therefore to suggest that all human behaviour is fundamentally irrational, driven by unbounded flows of desire that we neither recognise nor control, but it is to suggest that there is something beneath our rational interests, namely ‘investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society’. ⁶⁷ In its atmospheric qualities, ambient music provides a novel experience that is carefully calibrated to make the listener feel good, that operates not at first on their rational interests but that seeps in primarily through the irrational dimension of affectivity. Such libidinal investments – the affection of the body upon encountering the music, the body’s concurrent affective boost, and the subsequent ‘fixing’ of that encounter through representation as object of desire – bring about the ‘desiring-machine’ of bodies, technologies and affects that characterise ambient music as a consumer experience. Such investments tie the experience of atmospheric envelopment to regimes of economic production, doing so through the affordances of digital media platforms to capture user behaviour data which is then packaged and deployed according to strategic marketing imperatives. Indeed, as Anderson writes, due to the intimate link between music and mood that it both rests on and exploits, ambient music therefore becomes a means ‘of breaking down the murky noise of purportedly subjective moods into molecular, marketable, and normative components’. ⁶⁸

If it is true, however, as Franco Berardi suggests, that capitalism today with its deep transformations to the infosphere ‘has deeply penetrated the neural circuits of social culture’, ⁶⁹ then our situation is nonetheless one of ‘great ambiguity’, as Deleuze and Guattari write. ⁷⁰ This ambiguity is captured in the logic of both/and: it is certainly the case that ambient music’s atmospheres are something more complex than the innocent production of what Hagood terms ‘microspaces of freedom’, ⁷¹ just as, at the same time, they should not be overdetermined as mere symptoms of contemporary capitalism. Flows of desire always exceed their capitalistic coding such that, as Paul Roquet argues in a study of the popularity of ambient music in Japan, these atmospheres might well also constitute a mode of ‘reflection on weakness, care, and healing’. ⁷² Following such a possibility might well point through cracks in the horizon of capitalistic valorisation, to a place that would perhaps look less like Sloterdijk’s atomised and claustrophobic world of immunological bubbles, less like Rekret’s world of pacified masses, and instead more animated by a different relation to self and world, one that is ‘atmospheric, pathic, fusional’. ⁷³ This ambiguity leads us back, somewhat circuitously, to the scene of the child, alone in the dark, singing to remediate an unruly environment. For the study of atmospheres, we must ask: how is it that this barest of desires for atmospheric envelopment becomes channelled, captured, diverted in different ways according to the singularities of our capitalist worlds? In what ways does it invest us in the ongoing (re)production of social life? And how might we evaluate the ambiguous potentiality of atmospheres to invest us otherwise? ⁷⁴

Conclusion

This paper has theorised ambient music as a popular mode of atmospheric envelopment to draw out the implications of the situation in which the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped and modulated in the media environments of contemporary capitalism. This re-situates what geographers have previously identified as a burgeoning field of atmospheric interventions and affective design on the terrain of everyday media interfaces. It also, therefore, points towards the significance of our media environments in conditioning our senses of being in the world today. I have drawn attention to two key logics at work: that of an immunological function inherent to the fabrication of atmospheres through personalised media devices, and that of the role of such atmospheres in generating the investments of desire intrinsic to the production of surplus value in capitalist economies. Taken together these logics capture a way of relating to the idea of contemporary media environments as holding the capacity to effectuate new kinds of ‘worldly sensibility’. ⁷⁵ I want to conclude, therefore, by naming three consideration of the significance of ambient music – and atmosphere thinking more broadly – for explicating the conditions of life in contemporary capitalism.

The first of these relates to Sloterdijk’s argument that our notions of intimacy and relation are mediated and remediated in the diversity of technical practices by which we fabricate atmospheric envelopments. Ambient music as industrial genre and popular experience captures the way that our media environments, in facilitating ever-more insulated envelopments, inform a mode of self-experience particular to the contemporary world. For Sloterdijk, in this respect, ‘the science of culture must always also be a science of technology and a curatorial training for work in cultural hothouses’. ⁷⁶ Ambient music thus poses a first consideration to the atmospheres paradigm: the techniques by which we humans fabricate atmospheric envelopments for ourselves in our increasingly technically complex worlds enfold immunological functions that, in their function as shelter and withdrawal, can be simultaneously life-enabling and socially alienating.

Where Sloterdijk writes of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and thus of the formation of defensive spheres of intimacy, Deleuze and Guattari write of the machinic assembling of desire. As I have suggested in relation to this Deleuze-Guattarian understanding of investments of desire, ambient music presents an expression of the convergence of political and libidinal economies in the ways our modes of feeling and perceiving are increasingly mediated by digital technologies, and thus a second consideration: the atmospheres that envelop us invest us – our affects, behaviour, subjectivity – in broader spheres of production and consumption; and in this investment we risk losing sight of the contingent nature of our drives, predilections and aversions.

Finally, something particularly challenging about thinking with atmospheres is the suggestion that we are inevitably and irreducibly ‘enveloped, entangled, surrounded; we are never outside without having recreated another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered envelope’. ⁷⁷ In this respect, the outside of atmosphere is not a life free of all conditioning but is in reality no life at all. Carefully attending to atmosphere, then – through empirical documentation, conceptual explication or methodological experimentation – is not to dream of escape so much as to confront the possibility of being enveloped otherwise: it is to render the implicit explicit and malleable, workable and reworkable, and therefore open to contestation.