Music for an empty house

An empty house has a sound of its own — the fridge, a pipe, distant traffic, the floor. Most of the time we cover that sound with whatever is convenient. The trick of music for an empty house is to add to that sound without replacing it.

The wrong move is to fill the silence. A loud album turns an empty house into a venue; a quiet one turns it into a room. Aim for the latter. Long ambient pieces work because they sit just above the floor noise. Reading-room music works because it's polite to the room it's in. The sleep room works if the day has been long.

What I look for is music with air in the mix. Tracks recorded in a room you can hear; recordings that leave the windows open. A pop record mixed for radio sounds wrong in a quiet house because it's been edited to fill every frequency. The cracks are where the room lives.

Eventually someone else comes home and the brief shifts. Until then, the music can be as quiet as the house wants it to be.