Ambient Music - Soundtracks

Soundtracks

Ambient music has been used in many motion pictures, television shows and video games, and is notable for contributing to their atmosphere, or soundscapes. Vangelis wrote the scores for the British film Chariots of Fire, and for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, as well as many other score albums. David Lynch's 1984 film Dune, for example, forgoes the epic sci-fi adventure style theme music popularized by Star Wars in favor of a more atmospheric music score by Toto and Brian Eno. Throughout the 1980s Tangerine Dream composed scores for more than twenty films, most notably the soundtracks for Flashpoint and Heartbreakers, both released in 1984, and Legend, directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1985.

Electronic musician Paddy Kingsland is noted for the music style he brought to several serials of the television series Doctor Who which had until then relied mostly on stock music cues or minimal music for much of its history. The video game trilogy Fallout and its spinoffs use ambient music that sometimes contains gentle rumblings to portray the bleakness of the post-apocalyptic world which the games are set in. Relic Entertainment's 1999 game Homeworld uses such music to highlight the vast emptiness of the areas of deep space the Mothership often finds itself in. Another game series that uses ambient music is the Oddworld games, notably Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. That music was composed by Michael Bross. The games featured in Valve's Half-Life series, including spinoffs such as Portal, feature ambient music soundtracks by composers Kelly Bailey and Mike Morasky. The EA Game Mirror's Edge also used ambient music, composed and produced by Magnus Birgersson under his guise Solar Fields, to give a futuristic feel or puzzling atmosphere to sections of the game. The Sci-Fi horror game Doom 3 uses an ambient soundtrack made by former drummer Chris Vrenna of the band Nine Inch Nails, instead of having a song, mainly a MIDI file, looped through the entire map. Silent Hill is also a notable video game series for ambient soundtrack. Akira Yamaoka has composed the music throughout the series and is especially known for the use of industrial elements in his scores.