Where did the "space ambient" sound come from?

[Noclevername]

Being in SMAL doesn't help me, I'm afraid. Despite all the varied suggestions and examples given here, I still don't know what specific "sound" the OP is asking about.

Grant Hutchison

Me neither. Apparently something the OP thinks should be familiar.

[publiusr]

Quindar beeps would be a good space “sound.”

Ouch. I actually write, and play that kind of music on synthesizers. To me it’s not old-fashioned.

HOS.COM had some very nice space music in recent weeks.
Steve Roach and Patrick O’Hearn are my favorites.

Sadly, Harold Budd—who worked with Eno—passed away recently.

“ENO—His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound” is a good book which points the way towards ambient...

[Roger E. Moore]

Sadly, Harold Budd—who worked with Eno—passed away recently.

Oh, no! I am a huge Harold Budd fan, too, and Brian Eno!

[Roger E. Moore]

The more I think about it, the first "real" space music was from the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", with scenes like the following.

Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite Part I (2001: A Space Odyssey)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imbxqv_5TJU

2001: A Space Odyssey Ending With Interstellar Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fczY_FCOLME

[grant hutchison]

Kubrick's use of Ligeti's music was inspired, of course, particularly the distorted version of Aventures in the finale, but I don't believe Ligeti set out to write "space music"--he had a completely different agenda. Of course, we could then have a debate about the importance (or otherwise) of authorial intention.

By the way, the Wikipedia entry on "space music" seems to suggest it is not particularly related to "outer space", but to "spaciousness" and "spaciality", which chimes with my feeling that composers actually use lots of different kinds of music to conjure up lots of different emotional responses to "outer space". And there are parts of Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite which are "space music" under the terms of the Wikipedia article but which are, by definition, unrelated to outer space or space travel.

Grant Hutchison

[ngc3314]

A lot of the SF movie conventions trace back to (or at least through) Bebe and Richard Barron's electronic sound work for Forbidden Planet. When somebody hums a generic spacey music snippet, it often follows their conventions of sweeping low-high-low in pitch, plus the characteristic vibrato of a theremin player. (I only lately learned that the Forbidden Planet soundtrack used custom circuitry rather than a theremin, although Day the Earth Stood Still did employ one).

Every time theremins come up, I have to remark that every time I think I've had a bad day at work, I try to remember the time Leon Theremin's boss Beria asked Theremin to come up with a device to spy on Beria's boss, Stalin.

[parallaxicality]

Jesus Theremin worked for Beria? Just reading up on him. Poor guy. Fled for tax reasons, ended up in the gulag. Still, managed to die of old age, so there's that.

But yeah, I think the theremin probably had a lot to do with how we recognise space music today.

[publiusr]

"from Legeti to Ligotti to Cormac McCarthy...to Kali to Karswell to Kurzweil..."

There's a song in there somewhere...

[Roger E. Moore]

A lot of the SF movie conventions trace back to (or at least through) Bebe and Richard Barron's electronic sound work for Forbidden Planet. When somebody hums a generic spacey music snippet, it often follows their conventions of sweeping low-high-low in pitch, plus the characteristic vibrato of a theremin player. (I only lately learned that the Forbidden Planet soundtrack used custom circuitry rather than a theremin, although Day the Earth Stood Still did employ one).

Every time theremins come up, I have to remark that every time I think I've had a bad day at work, I try to remember the time Leon Theremin's boss Beria asked Theremin to come up with a device to spy on Beria's boss, Stalin.

Here are some samples from the soundtrack of "Forbidden Planet". Yes, excellent space music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR-M...7zJCE3EyJ0_ijV

[Delvo]

There seems to be some effort in here to try to find a way to take a music genre's name too literally.

"Rock" and "rock & roll" don't require anybody to be rocking or rolling. "Classical" is often used to include music that wasn't written in the Classical Era. "Hip hop" doesn't require that you hop or do anything in particular with your hips. "Country" can be played anywhere. "Folk" is no more "by the people" than any other genre is. "The Blues" not only can be done while wearing any color in a place of any color with instruments of any color, but also, even if you go with the original metaphor of "having the blues" for feeling sad/depressed, the music often doesn't sound sad/depressed, so it's a whole second level of derivation off. "Rhythm & Blues" isn't particularly more rhythmical or blues-like than most other genres are. "Metal" is not the only genre to use instruments made of metal, and "heavy metal" isn't its heaviest-sounding subgenre (nevermind that sound has no weight anyway). "Trance" doesn't actually cause trances. "Jazz" is simply gibberish.

There's a genre called "ambient". A genre within that genre apparently is called "space ambient". There are reasons why those words got chosen to be those genres' names, just as there are reasons why all of the above names got chosen (although in these cases they do seem a bit more transparent than some of the above to me, more like "techno" & "electronica" & "Gospel"). But objections about space-ambient not really sounding like space or not having been the only kind of music ever used in a space movie make about as much sense as objecting that nobody is actually killed in the making of "death metal" (or "death ambient" either).