I’ve always been a fan of classical music. In fact, I have a very broad taste in music. But classical music was always my go to for soothing and chillin’. This affinity for it only grew stronger as I got into gaming, specially the Final Fantasy series, which is commonly known for producing one of, if not the, best music compositions in all of video games.
Then back in 2018 (plot twist), as I was driving at night after my wife graduated as a Pediatrician, I was hit from behind as I was stopping on a red light, and the impact pushed me to violently hit the vehicle in front, causing the airbags of the car to deploy. I briefly lost consciousness, as I don’t recall the exact moment I was hit with the airbag. But once I got out of the car, and composed myself (uninjured) I kept having this ringing sound in my left ear. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as I had more important issues at hand, obviously.
Days, weeks and months went by without the ringing sound going away. As I researched the root cause of it and possible treatments, I first learned the name of it (tinnitus) and slowly came to the realization that this was likely never going to go away, based on the research I did. This issue, as I would later find out, was commonly caused by exposing yourself to prolonged headphone use with loud music, loud bangs such as the one from guns, and direct and hard impact to the ear (as it happened to me).
At first, it was really irritating, and to some extent depressing, having non-stop, 24/7 ringing in my ear. But I slowly started to learn how to deal with it. Besides being terribly annoying, this issue caused me to stop enjoying instrumental (mostly piano) songs, because the sharp sound of the notes would aggravate it.
Because of this, I started listening to those songs with a background mask of nature sounds; ambience sounds if you will. Then I found out there was a whole world of people on YouTube producing awesome videos of some of my favorite tracks merged with soothing rain, wind, and other sounds.
Even though I enjoyed most of these videos, they always seemed to have something missing. Either the sound effects were too low in volume, the length of the video was too short, the repetitive nature of the tracks wasn’t right, amongst other stuff. That’s when I decided to start creating my own videos. I already had the license and knowledge of Adobe Premiere, and I used to loved mixing tracks back in the ’00s when Acoustica Audio Mixer was a thing.
So I only had to make the decision to produce some of the best mixed ambience videos on YouTube. And that’s how Kingdom Ambience was born.