Background Music: But It’s Good for You

The music darts into the ear, does its subtle job in the subcortex of the brain, then slips out the other ear without saying goodbye. The listener is all but unaware that he has heard anything, but the music has sloshed around inside his head, and, relieved of the humdrum business of thinking, he feels better immediately. His mouth smiles. He likes his work, loves his wife, spends his money. The only thing he has to fear is silence, but thanks to a company called Muzak and its many imitators in the background music business, he has nothing to worry about. Loudspeakers are everywhere.

The total musication of America is by now almost complete. Muzak gets the credit for being the biggest noise maker of all, a feat that brings in $15,000,000 a year from its 30,000 subscribers. The soft comforting sounds that ooze from Muzak’s speakers are heard each day by more than 60 million people—in hospitals and mortuaries, elevators and space capsules, prisons and jute mills. It even plays during all top secret conferences in the Pentagon, where its mission is to confound eavesdroppers by drowning out all the secret talk. If there is something faintly Chaplinesque in all this, it escapes the Muzak men, whose simple aim is to bring out the best in people.

We Sleep with It. Armed with telephone lines reaching out to its army of loudspeakers, Muzak plays its melodies from inside locked rooms. Once a day, the Muzak man enters to change the tapes, and it is a comfort to know that the machines are linked so that even in the event of total catastrophe, they could continue playing untended.

Muzak programmers have studies that show precisely when workers get grumpy and lazy (10:30 in the morning, 3:30 in the afternoon), and they use their knowledge to plan programs of counteracting melodies, saving strong medicine such as Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo and Pass That Peace Pipe for the two big slumps. The tonic sometimes becomes addictive, as in the case of one Irving Wexler, who gets a thorough musication every day in his job as Miami’s Muzak man. “I have Muzak in every room of my home,” he says proudly. “Twenty-four hours a day. We sleep with it on, watch TV with it on. I never allow it to be turned off because I know that music has a therapeutic, psychological value.”

The Skeleton’s Showing. To win such willing ears, Muzak keeps things simple and undemanding, guided always by its sole esthetic law: music must be unobtrusive. Ensuring that Muzak never intrudes, Program Director Donald M. O’Neill, the top banana of the piped-in music world, frowns on jazz, vocal music of any kind, classics, instrumental solos, everything set in minor keys (too sad), and anything else that lasts more than three minutes. O’Neill, his ten musicologists and his 35 arrangers, all work for a “functional sound” that fits into their “stimulus chart.” Whenever they notice something in their music that grasps their own attention, they say, “The skeleton’s showing,” and gravely cut it out.

Muzak makes all its own recordings in an atmosphere of “the fullest artistic freedom,” then turns the results over to engineers, who squeeze down the dynamic range to a maximum of 25 decibels (compared to 50 on normal LPs). The new tunes are spliced into the standard Muzak library of 7,000 selections, replacing old numbers that are constantly weeded out. This procedure, O’Neill says, has led Muzak to swing a little bit lately—if the Peg O’My Heart Cha Cha can be called swinging.

Don’t Dance. Very early in its 29 years of programming music. Muzak learned to its great delight that the same music has the same wonderful effect on everybody. With this in mind, Muzak gets by with just three standard programs—Office, Factory, and Public Area Muzak. Office and Factory Muzak, each specially programmed, are piped to customers on alternate quarter hours around the clock. Public Area Muzak—a simple combination of the other two—plays constantly. Thus diners have their appetites involuntarily improved by the same tunes that increase the efficiency of riveters; ladies listening to Muzak through earphones placed in beauty-shop hair dryers have the consolation of knowing that their husbands are hearing the same thing clown at the sanitation plant.

Muzak keeps an ear cocked for any music that might cause emotional outbursts in its audience. Deep in the Heart of Texas causes workers to clap their hands, forgetting their tasks, and rock ‘n’ roll makes waitresses put down the soup and dance. Muzak’s special service for jet airplanes has discreetly abandoned playing I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling. At last they achieve their artistic ambition: music to be utterly ignored.

Pallid Pap. Lately, Muzak’s message has begun to drift around the world, always with the same serene results it has accomplished in America. Women workers in an Argentine flour mill who used to fight and scream at each other on sight, now go to work peaceably to music’s soft accompaniment. Passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad suffer the trip to the tune of Cossack songs and band music, and a brothel in Stuttgart has applied for the “Light Industrial” program local Muzak men offer.

Bland as it is though, piped-in music has a way of inflaming people—especially people whose feelings for music force them really to listen. “It’s so faint it sounds like angels singing—and that’s hell to work with,” says an unhappy listener at the Muzakized Ford plant in Dearborn. “It is pallid pap that will cause all our musical teeth to fall out,” says Helmut Blume, acting dean of music at Montreal’s McGill University. But in all their countless installations, background music hustlers claim to get complaints only from old men in green eyeshades and sleeve garters. “The nut who complains about music is the same one who bitches about the office being too hot or too cold and a thousand other things,” says a Muzak man in Los Angeles. Adds a colleague, serene in his calling: “We feel that anyone who doesn’t like music doesn’t believe in God.”