Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:47am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Ambient Soundscapes Session Chair: Can Bilir | |
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Tracing a History of Subversion in Ambient Music Eastman School of Music Ambient music’s origin myth typically enshrines Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and its provocative manifesto: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening at once. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Yet, as Robert Fink’s (2005) account of 1960s barococo reveals, background listening as a marker of sophistication long predates Eno. Thus, rather than inventing an ambient listening modality, Eno more accurately supplied it with a distinct sonic and paratextual identity. The Ambient series’ liner notes, graphic scores, and stereo stagings positioned the music above “derivative” Muzak, subverting relaxed listening through gestures of highbrow legibility. The ignorable, in Eno’s hands, was first and foremost interesting. But such media-tethered techniques inevitably expired. The compact disc and 1990s EDM culture relocated ambient into psychedelic chill-out rooms, where artists transformed digital detritus and glitch into expressive material, subverting ignorability through production aesthetics and altered states of mind (Cascone 2000; Szabo 2023). And, in today’s streaming era—characterized by ubiquitous listening practices (Kassabian 2013), AI-generated mood playlists (Drott 2024; Pelly 2025; Seaver 2022), and a resurgent “Muzak 2.0” (Hecker 2025)—background music has become a core mechanism of “platform” (Srnicek 2016) and even “surveillance” (Drott 2018; Zuboff 2018) capitalism. As Ambrose Field (2019) observes, “Today, nearly every space that can be filled with digital content is filled with digital content.” Victor Szabo’s (2019) titular “What Music Isn’t Ambient in the 21st Century?” recognizes a renewed tension between genre and listening mode. I argue that some contemporary ambient artists have responded by relocating the site of subversion to the sonic fabric itself. Analyses of recent, seemingly “anti”-ambient albums by Fennesz, Bing & Ruth, and Tim Hecker show how twenty-first-century ambient artists use carefully chosen disruptions that avoid certain syntactical constructions, allowing only practiced listeners to tune out. Drawing on theories of genre’s diachronic transformation (Born 2011; Fabbri 2016; Straw 1991) alongside cognitive accounts of expectation and processing (Huron 2006; Patel 2007), these works demonstrate that, once paratextual distinction could no longer secure ambient’s autonomy, the genre’s function is being preserved by those most vehemently challenging it. | |