For example “Secret Door”, “Anyways” by Arctic Monkeys; a lot of BTS’ songs, “Ocean Eyes” by Billie Eilish, “Love” by Lana Del Ray have have a very dreamy feel to them. I wonder why.
In:
This is hard to pin down, but there are some common traits to ambient/floaty music:
* Lack of functional harmony. This means that the music doesn’t have chords that obviously want to “go somewhere”. In typical pop music, for example, you’ll hear chord sequences like IV-V-I (the four chord, five chord, and tonic played in that order in a major key), where the IV is expected to go to the V, which is in turn expected to go to the I. These sequences, known as *cadences*, tend to create a more obvious structure to a piece of music, and their use is known as functional harmony. [These](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zGqN1ZOEJQ) two [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MycI9ZOSPRk) by the excellent 8-Bit Music Theory give some examples of *non*functional harmony, which is the practice of avoiding these kinds of sequences.
* Repeating ostinato figures. An ostinato is a sequence of notes played mostly unchanged throughout a piece. Once repeated enough times, ostinatos fade into the background and become sort of a general “color” or “setting” for a piece of music, rather than being heard as distinct notes. The second video linked above features a number of pieces that use an ostinato to create a mood.
* Lack of dramatic melodies, especially in terms of the interval (difference in pitch) between consecutive notes. Big jumps in melodies call attention to themselves and create drama. Small moves, especially moves that either stay firmly within a key or that move in only a single interval (as with the whole tone scale, which you probably know from the “you are getting veeeeery sleeeeeeepy” sound) avoid calling attention to themselves.
* Echo effects on the sound. This lets each note blend into the next in a smoother way, not making each of them distinct as a note in its own right. This obscures the harmony (reducing the power of functional harmony mentioned in the first bullet above if it’s present at all) and reduces the contrast between consecutive notes.
Basically, these are the opposites of the traits that create energy in music: interesting harmonies, changing melodies and rhythms, large or unusual melodic intervals, and (while I didn’t mention it explicitly) syncopation (throwing in off-beat notes).
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