Brian Eno never learned to read or write music, which probably helped his creative process more than it hurt it. He wouldn't have been capable of creating pure math if he tried. He instead played by ear, and not only his native keyboard, but also a vast array of tape recorders and soundboards, tinkering with primitive analog studio equipment with the enthusiasm of a hobbyist and the sensibility of an artist. Lester Bangs said he "goes to bed with machines," a phrase that sums up both the artificiality of his music, and the gentle humanism of it.

Eno was not the first to take this approach — Terry Riley and Steve Reich made music in the late sixties and early seventies that was supremely challenging an intellectually rewarding, music that has been described as "patterns" and "graphs" and, most tellingly, "drones," using many of the same methods. Eno built on these sounds, but his idea was fundamentally different. He had no intention of wrapping a listener in a thick blanket of sound, or involving their minds in musical problems to be solved through careful attention. He wanted music that would serve as a background, plain and simple. This is music to be lived around instead of inside of. He describes his intentions:

"I found I liked film soundtrack music... because film music is really music with its centre missing, because the film is actually the centre of the music, so if you just listen to the music alone, without seeing the film, you have something that has a tremendous amount of open space in it - and that space is important, because it's the space that invites you as the listener into the music. It sucks me in, that kind of space. So I started making things that just allowed much more room in them."

This is the idea behind "ambient" in a nutshell, a word that to this day belongs to Eno. Modern electronic ambient misses Eno's original idea by miles — it has beats and changes. Ambient music has space, placed inside a quality frame, space to read a book or eat a meal or write an essay about Brian Eno.

Music for Airports creates mood as well, in a less subtle way than Eno may have intended. The samples he chose to loop are affecting and lovely. "1/1" takes a piece of piano (Robert Wyatt's) with vast minor key potential, and then lets the song hover on only that potential. "2/1" does the same thing with ethereal vocals, chopped and looped into arrangements that are at first strange to hear, but later simply soothing. "1/2" combines the first two tracks somewhat, and then "2/2" breaks from the pattern altogether, and is composed only of synthesizer that achieves a sort of quiet majesty. The collective effect of these seamless sounds, and the silences within them and around them, is a combination of John Cage's idea of silence, wherein music should enable us to listen to the world around us, and a soothing balm for the soul. This is why it's called Music for Airports — it's both music to do other things to, and to calm jangled nerves.