Aquatic Ambience

"Aquatic Ambience" (also written as "Aquatic Ambiance") is a musical theme composed by David Wise for the video game Donkey Kong Country (1994). It plays in the underwater levels.

Composition
Wise initially worked as a freelancer and assumed his music would be replaced by a Japanese composer because of the importance of Donkey Kong to Nintendo. Rare asked Wise to record three jungle demo melodies, which were merged to become the "DK Island Swing", the first level's track. Wise was subsequently offered the job to produce the final score.

According to Wise, he "just [took] eight waveforms and played them in sequence and that first experiment became the baseline for 'Aquatic Ambiance. The song took five weeks to compose and Wise used a Korg Wavestation. He said the track was his favourite and the game's biggest technical accomplishment in regards to the audio.

Rearrangements of "Aquatic Ambience" appear in Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010) and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (2014).

Reception and legacy
In 2016, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club described the song as "a placid piece of music that uses a sophisticated palette of synthesized instruments and futuristic sound effects to create a mood of calm that's very different from the sped-up themes usually associated with platform games", being "more nocturnal and urban than submarine". He said that the song could be better appreciated "without a controller in hand", something that he considered rare, and that Wise seemed to be the only one that "managed to get as much texture and ambiance out of Super Nintendo's S-SMP sound chip" as he did.

"Aquatic Ambience" has been particularly influential. It has been described as "the 'Eleanor Rigby' of video game music", praised by artists such as Trent Reznor and Donald Glover, and Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club wrote that it spawned a "minor cult" dedicated to remixes. Glover sampled it in his 2012 song "Eat Your Vegetables", to which Wise expressed approval. In 2016, it was remixed for a video game music award.