Environmental

Environmental music is music composed for specific places and everyday settings rather than for the concert stage: museums, shops, stations, offices and homes. Its fullest flowering was the Japanese movement of the 1980s known as kankyō ongaku, in which *Hiroshi Yoshimura*, *Satoshi Ashikawa*, *Yoshio Ojima* and the *MKWAJU ensemble* wrote gentle, melodic ambient music on commission for buildings, exhibitions and brands. Descended from *Erik Satie*'s furniture music and parallel to *Brian Eno*'s functional ambient, it is mixed at conversation level and calibrated to be half-noticed, improving a space the way light or scent does.