Welcome to the Earth Modular Society Monthular challenge. This is a monthly optional patch prompt to inspire your creative process. To participate, stream on EMS and tag @monthular-stream on the #monthular channel of our Discord before or after you stream. Or, just do the challenges on your own for some patch inspiration!

EMS Monthular is a theme to inspire your patches, and his November we’re focusing on ambient music. Brian Eno coined the term, and describes it this way in the liner notes for his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports:

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. 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.

Below is a playlist of this month’s Monthular streams. Select the playlist menu (upper right in the video window), or “Watch on YouTube” (lower left) for playlist contents.