Discrete/Ambient/SoundScape/Whatever

[Allan Hoeltje <ahoeltje@best.com>]

All this Eno/Fripp talk has got my loopie juices flowing.

Every once and a while I will be in a noisy public place and I will
experience a phenomenon for which there must be a name.  All the sounds in
the place are competing for my attention/interpretation and the result is a
perceived piece of music which is greater than the sum of its parts.

The best place I've found for this is the Metro where there will be two or
three distant boomboxes, rhythmic train sounds, unintelligible 
announcements
on the PA, and lots of other background noise fading in and out of the mix.
Its as if my brain is desperate to hear a coherent melody and harmony and 
so
creates it.

Has anyone here experienced this?  Is there a name for it?  W. A. Mathieu
("The Listening Book") talks about listening to background sounds as if 
they
were music but I don't remember him giving it a name or describing that
which is heard as a synthesis created from the background.

-Allan