I recently read Brian Eno?s article, ?Ambient Music? and found it very interesting, so for my third project I decided to experiment with ambient music. I created a piece that was nearly twice as long as my earlier pieces and contained several more track layers than I usually include. Interestingly, after listening to it I felt that despite its atypical length, the segments were too short and I still wanted to hear more of them. Also despite the increased number of layers, I felt the piece sounded simpler and more intriguing than my earlier pieces. Overall, I found myself intrigued by how I wanted to hear more of a simpler piece. However, after looking back at Eno?s article, which had inspired me to create ambient music in the first place, I understood why I felt this way. Eno talks about how ambient music strives to create a state of immersion where one can have a sense of floating in the music. The best ambient music evokes certain moods and atmospheres within which you can comfortably lose yourself. I now understand my desire to hear more of the segments within my piece as a derivative of my desire to give myself the time to actually immerse myself and pay attention to the evocative idiosyncrasies that give the work greater depth. In my piece, I wanted to create a sensation of walking to the beach to observe a fast moving storm about to hit (I generated a wind sound with max msp and used very discreet sounds I also generated in msp to signal the transitions of the storm). The storm hits then moves on, all the while leaving you to enjoy its phases. Eno suggests an ambient piece should be as interesting as it is ignorable, and I felt that had I stretched out the segments more I would have approached equalized state. In Scafer?s article, ?The Music of the Environment,? he talks about the power of silence in the world soundscape. I think that ambient music can create a world soundscape unto itself due to its evocative nature. Within the ambient music soundscape silence serves as an important foundation for achieving this equalization by providing a context for interesting and ignorable movement within a piece. Additionally, silence naturally contrasts sound, thus allowing the most subtle sounds to contribute a great deal to the depth of a work.