But there is a difference between appreciation and preservation. Teibel’s albums washed up in yard sales and second-hand stores as relics from the dawn of the environmental movement.Īs technology increasingly shapes modern life and cities house an ever-growing share of the world’s population, these natural sounds and settings have become idealised once more. Both could be seen as extensions of what “Environments” tapped into, rendering simple natural sounds curiously out of date. Not long after, ambient electronica took off. Terrence Malick and Errol Morris used “Environments” sounds in their films.īy the 1980s New Age, a soothing, often synthesized genre of music suited to meditation, had gained popularity. He claimed “Environments 6” was included in the Voyager Golden Record, a sort of time capsule noting the “diversity of life and culture on Earth” for the benefit of future spacefarers. Teibel made ten more “Environments” records from 1969 to 1979, evoking the experience of a “wood-masted sailboat”, a “country stream”, the “ultimate thunderstorm”, an “alpine blizzard”, “gentle rain in a pine forest” and more. Audiophiles used them to showcase their hi-fi systems. College kids bought them, possibly as study aids. “Environments” gained major label distribution from Atlantic Records.Īs America endured a tumultuous decade, Teibel’s records found their ways into yoga studios, self-help seminars, New Age gatherings and after-hours comedowns. The lines between America’s hippy counterculture and pop culture were blurred by then, and his innovation was a hit. The recordings had benefits, he said, such as better sleep, better meditation and better sex. Teibel criss-crossed the country selling the LPs-and eventually cassettes and eight-tracks-marketing them as a stress-reducer. Not quite a real field recording, and nowhere close to a synthesizer record or sound effects collection, it had no obvious place in the stacks at record shops. With this enhanced recording, Teibel released “Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” in 1969 as a long-playing record. Together they processed a recording from Coney Island on an IBM 360 computer, adjusting volumes and inserting synthetic sounds to mask the break in the repeating loop.

Louis Gerstman, a friend, professor and neuropsychologist, suggested he try a different technique.

He made more than 100 recordings, but found little satisfaction. He set about recording various beaches along the American Atlantic coast hoping for the perfect ocean sound. As he edited his tapes, he found the sounds relaxing-much more soothing than his unusual musique concrète creations. While working on the soundtrack for a friend’s film, Teibel was asked to record the ocean waves at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Back in Manhattan, he studied synthesisers at the New School. Raised on classical music, Teibel had experimented with electronic music and musique concrète, which involved the editing and splicing together of recorded tape, while stationed as a public-information specialist with the American army in Stuttgart, Germany. An enterprising New Yorker, he set out to make it into a business. Teibel was inspired by the theories of Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physician and physicist, who in the 1860s wrote that reproducing the sounds of the wind and the sea could benefit human psychological health. Those recordings were made by Irving Teibel, an American sound technician, and they marked the first time that natural sounds were hawked as a product.

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