Word.ws English Dictionary

ambient music

ambient music noun: a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.

Noun

ambient music (uncountable)

  1. A genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.
    • There’s this old French composer I love named Erik Satie who wanted to compose what he called furniture music, by which he meant background music, music not meant to be noticed but to kind of just fill the room, which would now be called ambient music, but this was in the late 1800s, so pretty far...2024, Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars, Harvill Secker, page 306

Questions about ambient music

What does ambient music mean?
Ambient music means a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.
What part of speech is ambient music?
Ambient music is a noun.

Words near ambient music in the dictionary

  1. ambient devices
  2. ambient findability
  3. ambient food
  4. ambient foods
  5. ambient house
  6. ambient music
  7. ambient pressure
  8. ambient pressures
  9. ambient-like
  10. ambiently
  11. ambientness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ambient music (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ambient music.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ambient_music. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.