Muzak. Like the air, only sweeter
You might hate it. You might find it useful. The pleasant history and on-going conundrum of "background music."
Read time: about 11 minutes. This week: Muzak — or rather the Muzak sound, since “Muzak” no longer denotes a company but a type of music. (Kinda like “Kleenex” and tissues.) It’s a strange phenomenon, but I think also a wonderful one. Our recent ways of listening to “background music” are a bit concerning, though. I seem to have gone crazy with videos in the links, too. Next week: A piece of writing, and how it gets weird when used in the graded classroom. This is an extension of an earlier post on ungrading.
Below … an ad! I use The Sample myself, and it has been good so far. Nice to have something fresh and different appear in my inbox.
Hard rock musician Ted Nugent hated Muzak so much that he wanted to buy the company, “just for the pleasure of erasing the tapes,” according to Joseph Lanza, the best chronicler of “elevator music.” To the contrary, John Lennon told Rolling Stone that he liked listening to Muzak at home when Yoko Ono was out and about, though one should note that he also used the work “muzak” pejoratively in “How Do you Sleep?” (1971).
I’m no Ted Nugent, for sure, but I’m not a John Lennon either. I like easy listening music — the lush musical fare that made the Muzak Company famous in the twentieth century. “The Girl from Ipanema,” especially when sung by Astrud Gilberto, is worth swaying to a little when I hear it as I’m puttering in my garage. The song has become a mocking trope of music in elevators. I have been known to shed a tear while watching Cinema Paradiso, too, probably prodded by Ennio Morricone’s score, which is undeniably “easy-listening.” So, I’m not quite enough of a music snob to dismiss “elevator music,” Muzak, easy-listening music, or so-called “lounge music” — words whose meanings run into each other.
The Muzak sound intrigues in part because of its teetering identity: it can be genuinely moving but also cringe-inducing. Sometimes both at the same time.
Sculptor’s disdain, judicial recusal, UNESCO outrage, whimsical adaptations
I revisited Muzak as a topic when I read that John Cage announced in a 1948 lecture at Vassar College that he planned “to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to the Muzak Co. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long — these being the standard lengths of ‘canned’ music, and its title will be Silent Prayer.” In the early 1960s Cage and Muzak mixed again, when Cage was called in to quell a kerfuffle between the directors of the PanAm Building in New York and Richard Lippold, who had been commissioned to create a sculpture for the building’s lobby. The trouble was the lobby had Muzak, and (according to the New York Times) Lippold objected to “the idea of the conventional Muzak product seeping sweetly out of the surrounding walls and flowing around his work.” Lippold suggested that Cage could maybe do something to contain Muzak’s ooze, and Cage proposed a combination of the Muzak itself, “electric eyes,” and some artistic mechanisms to turn human movement in the lobby into an artistically acceptable Muzak remix. “Even people getting in and out of the elevators would have a part in producing in the sound,” the Times reported.
But it was not to be. “The American businessman and the esthete do not always see eye-to-eye,” a company vice president said. Lippold’s sculpture went up anyway, because PanAm decided it didn’t need Muzak after all.
Lippold was one of the legions of Muzak haters, though the great majority of the population thought little about the company and its musical product. The haters included music snobs (of course), some effete intellectuals, Ted Nugent (perhaps his own category), but also US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who disliked Muzak so much he decided he couldn’t do justice to it in court. He recused himself from Public Utility Commission of the District of Columbia et al. v. Pollak et al. (1952) that related to Muzak playing on Washington, DC, public transportation, and he left his reason in a note included in the decision. The court decided for Muzak, noting that a mere 3% of respondents to a survey about Muzak in streetcars found it objectionable.
Other Muzak haters took the world stage. In 1969, UNESCO’s International Music Council resolved to condemn “unanimously the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and the right of everyone to silence, because of the abusive uses, in private and public place, of recorded or broadcast music.” Apparently, UNESCO’s unanimity didn’t matter much, since Muzak continued to play.
Some disdain is playful. The Foo Fighters’ “Monkey Wrench” mocked the Muzak sound with a muzak-ified version of the group’s own “Big Me” playing in the background as band member Dave Grohl rides the elevator with a bag of groceries.
Other rock stars consented to have their music rendered into a form suitable for elevators, so their ridicule must not have been too much of an impediment. Lanza lists six pieces by The Doors (includes “Riders on the Storm”), sixteen by Bob Dylan, eleven from The Rolling Stones, including “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Ted Nugent submitted to a elevator-suitable John Fox arrangement of “Cat Scratch Fever” (!), among others.
Not just for easy listening?
The Muzak Company tooted along, despite hate and the ridicule, and in the twentieth century its musical product was ubiquitous and part of the shared experience of shoppers, travelers, forlorn people in dentist chairs, those mourning in mortuaries, and (of course) everyone on hold on the phone. James Keenan, from Stanford University, highlighted the unifying and communitarian aspects of Muzak in a 1967 speech to Muzak’s “Scientific Board of Advisors”:
Muzak helps human communities because it is a nonverbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village…. Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it massifies symbolism in which not few, but all, can participate.
Elsewhere, Keenan quipped that “thoughts about Muzak always lead to mysticism.”
The commercial intentions of Muzak customers provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories of musical mind control, and part of the objection to Muzak in the 1950s came from fears of manipulation. The company fought off the suspicions of serving as loudspeaker for “hidden persuaders,” but that’s not to say that the company didn’t seek to change human behavior. The Muzak sound was “functional music.” In a 1967 interview Muzak’s chief executive Umberto V. Muscio said, “Today, we think of music as our raw material. Our service actually lies in its sequential arrangement to gain certain effects and to serve a functional purpose.” The company’s research showed increased productivity, lowered stress in businesses, and higher sales as a result of Muzak in the air.
The functional aim continues unabashedly: Mood Media, the current owner of the Muzak brand, has the service mark “We Put People In The Mood To Buy.”
Quite early in its history, the Muzak Company adopted quarter-hour timeframes set into “formats” that provide musical selections to fit the ebb-and-flow of working life. During the doldrums of the business day, Muzak pumped out inspiring tunes; to get people going in the morning, upbeat and fresh pieces quivered in the air. The company also set up musical fare to fit a setting, since a fast food restaurant may have different overall “atmosphere” requirements than, say, a funeral home. Muzak designed many “formats” of music specifically crafted to elicit behaviors as well as conform to business expectations. Every business and organization could benefit. In Elevator Music, Lanza notes that
Military vigilance workers may have performed better with Muzak’s standard format, but workers employed in the world’s oldest profession at a brothel in Stuttgart, Germany, grew concerned because their uptempo Muzak “Light Industrial” selections were not getting customers in and out fast enough to secure a profitable turnover. The proprietors had to make a special request for livelier music on their second and fourth quarter-hours.
Lanza doesn’t report whether the music change had the desired effect.
“Muzak” coming through your earbuds, etc.
Today, if you walk on a college campus, stroll through its library, or tour a “commons area” you’ll run across many students wearing earbuds — everything from Apple’s pricey Airpods Pro ($249 a the Apple Store) to full-on headphones to foam-ringed varieties that you can cheaply buy at a convenience store. They’re listening to their own form of Muzak beamed in from Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, Pandora, Amazon Music. No phone lines anymore for background music — college wifi suffices. The experience is highly personalized, since the music pours directly into ears, not into shared spaces, and individual listeners usually choose the selections, though music streaming services augment selections with similar tunes — their “recommendations.”
The technology of listening has fundamentally changed and with it rearranged the society of listeners. The shift from shared musical environment to personal listening experience has far-reaching implications. Keenan’s idealistic notions of Muzak as a symbolic unifier of communities falls aside when everyone, literally, can listen to a different drummer. In his celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Sony’s Walkman, Matt Alt characterized the change: “After the Walkman, music could be silence to all but the listener, cocooned within a personal soundscape, which spooled on analog cassette tape. The effect was shocking even to its creators.”
It’s no wonder that students use their streaming services for background music in the library. Research has found that even “preferred background music can enhance task-focused attentional states on a low-demanding sustained-attention task and are compatible with arousal mediating the relationship between background music and task-performance” —which is another way of saying, mostly, that self-selected background music helps, so long as you don’t expect too much. Another recent study showed that noise isn’t good, but relaxing background music might even help with performing tasks accurately.
So, the research that Muzak did with its shared musical environments has been continued into the present. Other industry studies have continued as well in an effort to figure out how to make more money on listener-selected background music. You’d think that the radical shift from corporate-control to individual preference and control would eliminate corporate interest in background music. You’d be wrong. Rather, corporate focus shifted and perhaps has become more intense.
The “functional” part of music that Muzak’s Muscio was interested in — namely the effect of music on, say, sales in a department store — gave way to a set of signals “emitted” by listeners as they choose, as they listen, where they listen and any other data signal that might be teased out of the ether. In effect, a data-fied “personal soundscape” cocoons a data-doppelgänger of a listener. That complex of data becomes a new product of the music streaming company.
In an effort to increase revenues, Spotify, for example, offers music to listeners and data doubles of listeners to others. It’s not just about the music; it’s about your life while listening.
Jana Jakovljevic, Head of Programmatic Solutions at Spotify, provided an example of the depth of the data in a 2015 presentation at ATS (Ad Trade Summit). “Yes, a user will create a playlist for partying and working out, that makes sense, but they are also creating playlists for more obscure activities. For example showering,” she said. “We have 39,000 showering playlists on Spotify, 550,000 shower streams per day. So we not only know what are users are listening to, we also know their personal activities as well.”
In effect, streaming music has become “a technology of surveillance,” as Eric Drott calls it in a 2018 article in the Journal of the Society for American Music.
Intensive personalization through smartphones and streaming services has changed “where” music is in the most profound ways. It is where you are most deeply and meaningfully. “Music today is like a non-stop sound track running through people’s lives,” a Wired UK article observes. “Adrian North, a professor of psychology at Australia's Curtin University, says that music has become so pervasive that, although it still forms a central part of people’s identity, ‘it’s as though it’s become so omnipresent that they’ve almost forgotten about it…. You can't separate your musical identity from the rest of your identity any more.’ ”
Your streaming service already is as invisible and as pervasive as Muzak was for your grandparents as they shopped and worked. But your streaming service differs in its function and how it succeeds as business. You are a bigger part of the overall picture than your grandparents ever were for Muzak. And you are known and transformed into product.
You likely didn’t even know it.
Tags: elevator music, mood music, muzak, easy listening, music and behavior, emotion, surveillance, behavior modification, surveillance
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Probably the best book on “elevator music” — an easy and amusing, if somewhat frenetic, read: Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador USA, 1995; and Lanza, Joseph. “Easy-Listening Acid Trip (Video).” Blog. Joseph Lanza’s Nerve Center (blog), September 2, 2020. https://josephlanza.blogspot.com/2020/09/blog-post.html.
Not exactly on Muzak the company, but “Muzak” the music, generically. Lots of “easy-listening” and interviews about the phenomenon: Rodley, Chris. The Joy of Easy Listening Music. TV movie. BBC, 2011.
What happens to society when you put Muzak in your ears: Alt, Matt. “The Walkman, Forty Years On.” The New Yorker, June 29, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-walkman-forty-years-on.
The data geeks have got it all under control: Vanderbilt, Tom. “Echo Nest Knows Your Music, Your Voting Choice.” Wired UK, February 17, 2014. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/echo-nest.
Very perceptive and useful scholarly article on what streaming means for a business: Drott, Eric. “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” Pre-publication manuscript, March 18, 2018; published in the Journal of the Society for American Music 12(3) (2018).
A little odd, but also interesting. Joseph Lanza appears in this Finnish documentary on background music: Taanila, Mika. Thank You for the Muzak. Documentary (1997), edited version in YouTube video, 2017.
Justice Frankfurter hated Muzak, and it showed. This decision also includes an important view from Justice Douglas on the “freedom to be let alone”: Public Utility Commission of the District of Columbia et al. v. Pollak et al., U.S. 451 (1952) 343 453 (US Supreme Court 1952). Online: https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/decision/public-utilities-commission-of-the-district-of-columbia-et-al-v-pollak-et-al/.
The 1960s saga of the PanAm Building statue by Richard Lippold, who enlisted John Cage to get rid of the Muzak: Ericson, Raymond. “Music World: No Sound At All; Muzak versus John Cage Ends in Silence At Pan Am.” The New York Times. August 12, 1962, sec. X.
Regarding last week’s post on art and war in Ukraine: Belorusets, Yevgenia. “Letters from Kyiv.” Artforum (blog), March 31, 2022. https://www.artforum.com/slant/a-wartime-diary-by-yevgenia-belorusets-88035 and (paywall) Guerin, Michel. “« Le Journal de Yevgenia Belorusets à Kiev Instaure Un Climat Poétique Dans Un Décor de Ruines ».” Le Monde.Fr. April 1, 2022, sec. Débats. https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/04/01/le-journal-de-yevgenia-belorusets-a-kiev-instaure-un-climat-poetique-dans-un-decor-de-ruines_6120129_3232.html.
And a follow up on the reference to tuning guitars in “Grasping mind”: Newport Folk Festival. Adrianne Lenker: Alternative Guitar Tunings, 2021.
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