Furthermore, most classical music is mono-scalar. Let me explain. Mozart's music is crisp and straightforward. It sounds very much the same at any volume. (Granted, Mozart never intended his music to be recorded and played back at different volumes in different locales on different devices. Mozart composed his orchestral music to be played live and loud at concert halls, which is one reason his music sounds much better live and loud and at concert halls.) Unlike recorded Mozart, ambient music is multi-scalar. It actually sounds intriguingly different at different volumes in different locales. The music itself seems to change. Ambient music often sounds great in a moving car because it assimilates the environmental noises of driving, making the car's incidental hums and rattles a part of the music's overall composition. Ambient music is frequently amorphous, more about mood and less about fixed rhythm. Consequently, ambient music is able to gracefully absorb the randomness of white noise because ambient music itself has no metered agenda to keep.

I rarely tire of listening to such music because each ambient CD represents a multitude of possible listening experiences. Pop music has been called "bubble gum" music, in part because of its short-lived nature. "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys is tasty for the first few chews, but it loses its flavor shortly thereafter. Not so ambient music. Ambient Music is more like "Maxwell House" music – good to the last drop.

Based on Eno's succinct definition, then, ambient music is not its own genre, but rather a pan-genre sub-element. We have observed that floatingly structured, echo-toned compositions lend themselves well to an ambient listening experience; but structural and tonal elements in and of themselves don't define ambient music. I prefer to think of ambient music as fractal music. Basically, without going into chaos theory, a Mandelbrot fractal is a colored graph of a non-linear equation that retains an infinite amount of detail at the equation's boundary. (You've seen these fractals on hippy bumper stickers alongside the obligatory "I Worship Jerry" drivel.) As you magnify the boundary of a Mandelbrot fractal, said boundary continues to show itself equally intricate at 10X amplification, 100X amplification, 100,000X amplification, etc. The boundary of a Mandelbrot fractal looks beautiful from far away, and it looks beautiful from close up. Furthermore, similar patterns occur and reoccur at every level of magnification. Unlike a Impressionist painting, the recognizable patterns do NOT disappear as you move in closer. In the words of James Gleik in his book Chaos : Making a New Science,

"A geometric shape has a scale, a characteristic size. [But] to Mandelbrot, art that satisfies lacks scale, in the sense that it contains important elements at all sizes. Against the Seagram Building, he offers the architecture of the Beaux-Arts, with its sculptures and gargoyles, its quoins and jamb stones, its cartouches decorated with scrollwork, its cornices topped with cheneaux and lined with dentils. A Beaux-Arts paragon like the Paris Opera has no scale because it has every scale. An observer seeing the building from any distance finds some detail that draws the eye. The composition changes as one approaches and new elements of the structure come into play."

So ambient music is fractal music; art without scale. Pretty deep, literally. That's all the sophomoric philosophizing I have time for in this article. After all, I'm merely supposed to be a music critic, dude. So without further ado, here are 8 ambient CD's from 8 different genres. The control is ambience, the variable is musical genres. Let the stereo lab experiment begin: