I’ve written in many places, some wonderful, others makeshift or uncomfortable. I’ve written on trains and in hotel rooms, at ergonomically perfect desks and on laptops balanced on my knees. I once spent a few days working at a table in the middle of a vast, empty factory in France. I still dream about a hut on a remote Scottish island with no internet access or cell-phone reception, where I sat at my desk and watched the sun set over the sea.
Wherever I am, one constant presence is noise. I don’t believe I’m unduly sensitive to it, though I certainly will hunt for a mysterious electrical hum in a hotel room or end up nodding my head to the off-kilter rhythm of a washing machine. For several years in London, I lived next door to a boy who made terrible techno music in his bedroom studio. As I tried to concentrate on my work, the walls of my study would vibrate with bass. It was the music’s ineptness, as much as its volume, that made it unbearable. The sweltering summer I first moved to New York, I lived near ground level in the East Village. When I couldn’t stand the elderly air conditioner blasting in my ear, I opened the window, and it was as if the street leapt into the room. I was, it transpired, trying to work next to the only sittable stoop on a busy block. Day and night, people argued, broke up with their partners, made drug deals, howled at the moon. I might as well have dragged my desk out onto the sidewalk; at least it would have been cooler.
Later, I moved out of that place and into a studio in Chelsea that I shared with my girlfriend, also a novelist, and for a while we wrote books at tables facing opposite directions in the tiny space. We were on the seventh floor, high enough that the traffic noise wasn’t oppressive. At night, fire trucks would roar down 23rd Street, the sound of their sirens ripping through the darkness. I think it took me two or three years to start sleeping well in New York, and I was lucky that I had research to do in the Mojave Desert, where the silence felt precious, almost magical.
John Cage once visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, among the most quiet spaces in the world, designed for acoustics research. “In that silent room I heard two sounds, one high and one low,” he recounted in a lecture. Asking the engineer what they were, he was told that “the high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation.” Craving this experience, I persuaded someone to give me access to an anechoic chamber at a university in Berlin. It was an almost monumental space, designed for testing engines. Bathed in warm yellow light like a Seventies science-fiction set, it was essentially a large cube lined with baffles and a wire-mesh floor suspended across it, the drop underfoot being the same as the clearance overhead. The chamber’s engineer was going on his lunch break and said that I could spend an uninterrupted hour inside. He showed me the trick to opening the door in case the experience got too intense. Sometimes people didn’t even last a few minutes, he said.
I put on a blindfold and lay down on the springy wire floor. The absolute absence of sound was disconcerting. Soon enough, I heard a high tone. I surmised from reading about Cage that this was probably not the music of my nervous system, but rather a sign of minor hearing damage. I also began to hear a whooshing noise, as my heart pumped out blood and pulled it back again. It was revelatory but also odd. I could imagine my brain “flipping” and processing this absence of sound as something positive, a pressure that was crushing, bearing down on my skull. I began to understand why extended sensory deprivation is a form of torture.
In the real world, there’s always sound. The goal for a writer—or anyone trying to concentrate—is not achieving absolute silence but finding or creating an acoustic environment where you can get into the zone, what some psychologists refer to as a flow state. So I mute all notifications; I close the door; I indulge elaborate arson fantasies about the Mister Softee truck as the mindless ice-cream jingle pierces my sensorium like a toddler jabbing me with a popsicle stick. On days when my concentration falters, everyday neighborhood sounds can be enough to throw me off—people moving around, talking in the garden next door, a car alarm at the other end of the block.
In a devil’s bargain for the loss of tranquility, the modern world has offered us headphones. At the moment, hanging under my desk is a set of closed-back cans that are almost comically substantial, the sort of thing a pilot would wear. When I’m inside them, I’m sealed off, perhaps slightly more than I’d like. The question is what to play through them. What kind of sound will help me focus when I am scattered and distracted?
When I’m working, I do not listen to music in the normal way, in order to find entertainment or stimulation. Or at least that’s the theory. I cannot pretend that I do not occasionally put on a banger. But in general, I do not want my focus drawn to the sound. I need something that is stable enough to think inside, something that feels still, or at least continuous, something more like a space than a narrative. It must be present enough to substitute for the noise of the world, but not so insistent that it compels my attention. The term “ambient music” often conjures up unchallenging electronic washes. Who among us has not cracked jokes about whale song and massage therapists? I have bad memories of a period in the Nineties when you could have a global hit by playing Gregorian chant and some rainforest samples over a slow breakbeat. In the liner notes to Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album that is usually the starting point for any discussion of these matters, Brian Eno draws an important distinction:
Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms), Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. 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.
The idea of music that can “accommodate” multiple levels of attention without “enforcing” any one is the most precise definition I’ve found for the kind of music that helps me to work. As Eno says, it’s less “background music” than it is multilevel music, something that creates a perimeter if that’s what I want, but which doesn’t suffer from requiring my sustained attention. I don’t think of ambient music as a genre, except in the most vague way. It’s not a particular set of sounds; it’s more a practice of listening, of using music as a tool to induce a particular mental state. When it’s functioning, the music recedes, leaving a space for thought. And though I’m not aware of it, I’m still listening. I have a high tolerance for repetition, but kitsch and banality quickly begin to force themselves to the front of my mind. Clicking on a playlist titled lo–fi beats to relax/study to brings me little relaxation or sense of studiousness. Since I am also a degenerate record collector, this suits me fine.
The need to find the perfect work music has inevitably become an excuse for extended flights of procrastination. My search has taken me from ethnographic field recordings to New Age cassettes and contemporary electronic music. The idea of sound as space, or perhaps architecture, has threaded through all sorts of places and times. In 1917, Erik Satie wrote a chamber piece called “Carrelage Phonique” or “phonic tilting,” four bars of a simple figure, played by strings and woodwind instruments, intended to be repeated ad infinitum, as background for an event. In notes, he suggested a luncheon, or a civil marriage. It was what we would now call a loop, one of a handful of similar pieces he referred to as musique d’ameublement, or “furniture music.” Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Harry Bertoia, probably best known as a furniture designer, made resonant metal sound sculptures. In the Eighties, Japanese brands commissioned talented contemporary composers to make background music for stores and offices. In 1988, musicians in Washington State calling themselves the Deep Listening Band descended into a vast abandoned cistern that had a natural forty-five-second reverb time. I have a record of one of the same musicians playing slow tones on a trombone in a Gothic abbey.
Of course, what I’m describing has a relationship to meditation or trance. There are various primal scenes for this kind of music. The Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath arrives in New York and teaches a generation of avant-gardists about the spiritual effects of the tanpura drone. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones visits the Berber village of Joujouka in the Rif Mountains of Morocco, carrying a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Debussy hovers around the enclosure of the Javanese village at the International Exposition of 1889 in Paris, his mind expanded by the gamelan ensemble. The wide streak of hippie-trail Orientalism in ambient music (all those sitars!) is almost structural, a product of messy, unequal encounters between European modernism and the rest of the world. Yet at their best, these meetings have been authentic and revelatory. “I would like to see,” Debussy once said,
and I will succeed myself in producing, music that is entirely free from motifs, or rather consisting of one continuous motif, which nothing interrupts and which never turns back on itself.
The music that induces a state of concentration in me might well not work for you—or the person at the next table in the noisy coffee shop. There are pieces that are as central to my writing life as the office chair I sit on and, in some ways, as little regarded. They can jump-start me from distraction to focus, but I suspect that their power is partly a function of how—and how much—I’ve listened to them. They have carved channels, reinforced neural pathways that allow me to access the mental space I want to occupy. Looking for this music has, as a sort of byproduct, introduced me to so many cultural subcurrents that I will probably spend the rest of my life exploring all the tributaries. As I write, I’m listening to a heavy analog drone produced by a French composer called Éliane Radigue, a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. And I’m also really distracted, even disturbed, because I just discovered that some sicko has posted a twelve-hour loop of the Mister Softee jingle online.
