Furniture music (musique d’ameublement) is Erik Satie’s name, coined in 1917, for music intended to belong to a room like its fittings, present in the background rather than demanding attention. His first set carried titles such as Tapisserie en fer forgé and Carrelage phonique, wrought-iron tapestry and phonic tiling. A second set, Sons industriels, was premiered in Paris in 1920 at the Galerie Barbazanges, with Darius Milhaud among the performers, as intermission music for a now-lost comedy by Max Jacob.
The pieces stayed largely unknown for decades after Satie’s death and were only fully published from the 1970s onwards. John Cage revived the idea, and it is now widely cited as an antecedent of ambient music, which Brian Eno later defined in contrast to commercial background sound as music that should reward attention without demanding it. For drone, furniture music is an early proposal that sound might function as an environment one inhabits rather than an event one watches.