Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a studio album by the English musician Brian Eno. It was released in February 1979 through E.G. Records and Polydor Records. It was the first Eno album released under the label of ambient music, a genre intended to "induce calm and a space to think" while remaining "as ignorable as it is interesting". While not Eno's earliest entry in the style, it is credited with coining the term.

The album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths, and was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal as an alternative to "canned" Muzak and easy listening styles. The album was the first of four albums released in Eno's Ambient series, which concluded with 1982's Ambient 4: On Land.

In 2004, Rolling Stone credited Music for Airports with defining the ambient genre. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it the greatest ambient album of all time.

In 1975, Eno was hospitalised after a car accident. While he recovered at home, his friend Judy Nylon brought him an album of classical harp music and set it playing quietly against the sound of the rain against the window. The sound blended with the rain outside the room and, unable to get up and adjust the volume, Eno allowed it to create an ambience aligned with his fluctuating attention. Alongside this experience, his concept of ambient music would build upon composer Erik Satie's idea of "furniture music", music that is intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room and "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner" rather than be directly focused upon. The album Discreet Music (1975), per Eno's own judgement, was his first foray into ambient music.

After spending several hours waiting for a flight at Germany's Cologne Bonn Airport and becoming annoyed by its uninspired atmosphere, Eno conceived an album of music "designed for airports". He intended for the album to still function within various other situations. Ambient music was then a "relatively modest field", "more a concept than a genre", and mostly created against the context of dominant muzak practices. Eno's concept was distinct from elevator music and easy listening's "derivative" background noise approach, and was instead to be used as a means of creating space for thought. In the album's liner notes, Eno explained:

Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Eno later named the Ray Conniff Singers and the "Borgesian idea" of a self-generated "world in reverse" which is centered around music as inspirations during this period.

[Eno] was in part striving to create music that approximated the effect of visual art. Like a fine painting, these evolving soundscapes don't require constant involvement on the part of the listener. They can hang in the background and add to the atmosphere of the room, yet the music also rewards close attention with a sonic richness absent in standard types of background or easy listening music.