Music: Trapped in a Musical Elevator

Muzak, now 50, soothes (or irritates) 80 million people a day

Yes, this was the year in which Ronald Reagan was re-elected to the White House, but those with a broader historical perspective have other things to commemorate. Like the 400th anniversary of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first colony in the New World, the 300th anniversary of the completion of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, the 100th anniversary of the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary and the 50th anniversary of Muzak. Muzak? Wouldn’t that be like celebrating the first broadcast singing commercial (1924)?

The sound of Muzak is, of course, almost everywhere, and metastasizing: in the bank and the supermarket and the of fice elevator, on the telephone line when the victim has been put on hold. It plays in the White House and the Pentagon; it played during the Olympics; it played in the Apollo XI spaceship that carried Neil Armstrong to the moon.

The Muzak Corp., which is now part of Westinghouse, estimates that its recordings are heard by 80 million people every day; they are syndicated in 19 countries; the company and its affiliates take in more than $150 million annually. “Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning,” says James Keenan, an industrial psychologist and chairman of the firm’s board of scientific advisers, “because it massifies symbolism in which not few but all can participate.” But not quite all, Dr. Keenan.

“Horrible stuff’ was the term once applied by the artist Ben Shahn. “Abominably offensive,” said the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. And Philip Glass: “The range of music is truly enormous—opera at the top, Muzak at the bottom.” John Cage spoke of composing a piece especially for the tormentors, with no notes in it. “The first step in describing silence is to use silence itself,” Cage explained. “Matter of fact, I thought of composing a piece like that. It would be very beautiful, and I would offer it to Muzak.” Perhaps Cage had that in mind when he created 4′ 33 “, which consists of one or more musicians sitting on a stage and not playing their instruments for 4 min. 33 sec.

That Muzak should soothe the inhabitants of the Pentagon is fitting, for the whole system was basically the creation of an unusual general, George Owen Squier, a West Pointer (’87) who devoted much of his Army career to science. Assigned to evaluate the military potential in the experiments of the Wright Brothers, he became in 1908 one of the first passengers to fly, for all of nine minutes, in a Wright machine. As a young artilleryman, he invented the polarizing photochronograph to measure the speed of a projectile.

On the U.S. entry into World War I, Squier became head of the Signal Corps, and his omnivorous curiosity led to a notable invention: a system for transmitting several messages simultaneously over existing electric power lines. In 1922, nearing retirement, he took his ideas and his patents to the North American Co. utilities combine, which backed him in launching Wired Radio, Inc., a kind of competitor to the booming fad for wireless radio. But not until 1934, the year of his death, did the general think up a catchy new name, combining the sound of music with the sound of the popular camera called the Kodak.

The first Muzak recording in 1934 was a medley of Whispering, Do You Ever Think of Me? and Here in My Arms, performed by Sam Lanin’s orchestra. The first customers were householders in the Lakeland section of Cleveland, who were offered, for $1.50 a month, three channels ranging from dance music to news. As a novelty, Muzak might well have gone the way of Sam Lanin’s orchestra. But a series of experiments started in the late 1930s provided Muzak with the secret that converted base music into gold.

The secret was that music could get more work out of people. Eureka! An early test, conducted at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, showed or purported to show that “functional music” in a workplace reduced absenteeism by 88% and early departures by 53%. Other tests produced even richer results. When The Blue Danube was piped into a dairy in McKeesport, Pa., the cows gave more milk; recordings inspired chickens to lay more eggs. The coming of World War II made this more than a matter of money: thousands of U.S. factories, arsenals and shipyards were wired for music and increased production by as much as 11%.

Muzak is still conducting such tests, and still crowing over the results. At a firm called Precision Small Parts Inc. in Charlottesville, Va., for example, Muzak spent three months last year testing six women who spent their dreary days deburring very small items with dental drills. With Muzak in their ears, they deburred 16.8% more than before. Other tests showed that if music can make people produce more, it can also make them buy more. Sedately paced melodies in a supermarket slowed down customers enough so that they spent 38% more money.

Muzak enthusiasts argue that there is a great tradition of music as an accompaniment to work. “It did so in the fields behind the great castles and monasteries of the middle ages,” says Keenan. “It did so on shipboard and in the taverns where sailors met to sing their chanteys.” Keenan has even unearthed a songbook once issued by a youthful industrial firm, which included a spirited ditty called Ever Onward Ever Onward: “Our reputation sparkles like a gem/ We’ve fought our way through and new/ Fields we’re sure to conquer too/ Forever onward IBM.”

The gentler inspirations that Muzak calls “environmental music” work for several reasons, particularly for people subject to either stress or boredom. Music is soothing. Oddly enough, Muzak even claims that its recordings make workers feel more in control of their environment and more cared for by their employers. Most important, though, is that workers slow down in mid-morning and midafternoon, and music can counteract that. Muzak’s selections get faster as the workers near those slack periods. The company calls that “stimulus progression.”

Muzak music is not supposed to be consciously heard. “Once people start listening they stop working,” says Muzak’s president Tony Hirsh. That is why its songs never have words. But though Muzak has come to seem synonymous with slushy string tones, the company makes a great effort to keep up to date. Its current repertory of 5,000 includes songs by Michael Jackson and the Police, as well as Cyndi Lauper’s All Through the Night. In fact the company records about 1,000 new hits every year. It makes its selections with the help of a computer and broadcasts the tunes by satellite from Stamford, Conn., to 180 receiving stations around the country.

But if Muzak at 50 is so useful and productive and successful and popular (the company says its polls repeatedly show that more than 85% of its customers enjoy what they get), why do some people hate it so passionately? One reason is simply that they believe this system perverts and prostitutes one of life’s greatest pleasures, listening to music. And it probably deadens people’s ability to enjoy music that they do listen to by choice. And the whole process is coercive. People who did not want to hear radio music pumped into them on Washington buses carried their objections all the way to the Supreme Court, only to have the court rule in 1952 that this invasion of their privacy was not an invasion of their privacy. (Justice William Douglas’ dissent reasserted the principle that “the right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”) Composer Jacob Druckman is one man who retains a sensitivity to music even when Muzak tells him not to listen. “I grit my teeth whenever I go into an elevator or a restaurant,” says he.

“With any other medium, you can turn your back or close your eyes, but there’s no escape from music.” —By Otto Friedrich