Working Visually In Music

If something starts as an ambient piece, or is just atmosphere, it usually stays that way--unlike traditional songs which can be rearranged. Traditional songs can add atmosphere, but ambient music can't add traditional instruments so easily because they stick out in the foreground too much. If you're going to use traditional instruments and atmosphere, everything has to be pushed to the background. If you have vocals, they have to be treated so that they could be placed farther away from the foreground. In ambient music nothing really is in the foreground, at least not for long. It is a low-contrast music. If you have a monochrome piece of art that's mostly grays and pastels, then add red accents, it pushes it all the way to the foreground. So it's true that ambient music is more like painting because you're using the same z-axis. Even though painting is on a flat plane, recorded music relies on spatiotemporal aspects. What I really like about music is that you can use that space which doesn't exist in visual art.