Wonderful question. It's impossible to answer at a general level.
Music composition is not "a technical matter", even if music is "a technical matter" as well.
You can follow some scheme, but, in my opinion, not necessarily when you create Ambient or New Age music. A formal scheme has never been set for the above genres. Brian Eno, the father of Ambient music, said that an ambient piece can be either listened to or ignored, depending on the choice of the listener. This is the reason why ambient music is considered ideal as background for spas, restaurants and other public places where people needs relaxation and stress-relief.
Ambient and New Age music can be instrumental or electronic or both, with human voices or not. In other words, Ambient and New Age music are freedom.
So, where do I get my inspiration? A place, a landscape, a sunset, a state of mind, a situation, a sound, but my favorite source of inspiration is the silence. Leopold Stokowski said "A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.". I feel nothing is so true as that sentence.
I want to tell this story: a day I was on a wonderful beach with my wife, in front of an amazing sunset. A perfect silence, because the sea and the wind are not noises, they are sounds that mingle with the silence.
We were trying to imagine something under the surface of the sea, and my wife told me "I see a dolphin and a siren dancing across the waves...". "What are they dancing?" I asked, and my wife answered "Oh, surely a waltz, a Viennese waltz...".
And so, "The Siren And The Dolphin" was born in my mind.
Luigi Saracino
