How MUZAK Does That

How did wall-to-wall music find its way into every public space? Meet General George Squier.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This is how music does that.I'm Dale McGowan. A couple of weeks
ago, I had a tooth extracted. Here's what I heard. Later,

(00:20):
I went to home depot, whichsounded like this, and I shopped at
Kroger. Then, two full weeksafter Christmas, this was coming out of

(00:48):
a gas pump. As I filledmy tank. Waiting in the gate at
the Atlanta Airport, I was assaultedfor forty five minutes with one of the
most vacuous genres of music, smoothjazz. When I got on the plane,
it switched to pop songs. Eventhe safety video is scored with music.

(01:17):
Please settle in, and from allof our crew, thank you for
flying with Delta. Didn't used tobe like this. When did music get
so inescapable? I got terrible musicon hold with my insurance company. Podcasts
and TV shows and movies have increasedthe constant presence of music, often droning

(01:42):
along behind spoken dialogue for no particularreason. As I mentioned in the Oppenheimer
episode, nobody knows what you playit. There's one of those upscale outdoor
retail villages near our house. It'smixed use. There are luxury apartments above
the Anthropology and Lulu and Banana Republic, and music is piped through outdoor speakers

(02:05):
just outside the windows of these luxuryapartments eleven hours a day. Music absolutely
permeates modern life. Not many publicspaces are allowed to exist without a soundtrack,
and thanks to a century of advancingtechnology, we can also fill our
private spaces with music, and oftendo in the car, on a walk

(02:27):
doing the dishes. When I taughtmusic courses at Oglethorpe University, almost all
the students would enter the classroom withearbuds in listening to music. When we
talked about the impact of music technology, I would start the class by asking
how many of them had heard musicless than five minutes before class started,
and almost everybody raised their hand.Now, never mind whether this overwhelming saturation

(02:53):
of our lives with music is goodor bad. It's bad. Let's just
start with the fact that it's different. For most of human history, the
experience of music, aside from afew hymns on Sunday in your own whistling
or singing around the house, wouldhave been rare. Until the late nineteenth
century. It wasn't at all commonto have a piano in the home,

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and even then it was often justa status symbol, a sign that you
had arrived in the middle class wasmostly unplayed. I remember as a kid
in the seventies visiting my next doorneighbors for some reason in Loch Resenna,
California, and seeing in their livingroom a beautiful baby grand piano. The
keyboard cover was closed and covered withframed family pictures. That sucker was never

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played. I'm getting ahead of myself. My neighbors in the nineteen seventies didn't
need their piano in order to beimmersed in music all the time. But
in earlier centuries, aside from thosechurch hymns and maybe the odd fiddle in
the pub, you might go weeksor months without hearing music. And that
began to change with the phonograph Iwork. Even that was still music at

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your discretion, right, You weren'timmersed in it all the time. It
didn't follow you to the store andto the dentist. But that was about
to change thanks to Major General GeorgeOwen Square. General Square was a big
deal in the US military at theturn of the twentieth century. First of
all, he was a scientist andinventor with a PhD from Johns Hopkins,

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not a common thing in the militaryat the time. He invented cameras and
radio technology. He was the firstmilitary passenger in an airplane with the Wright
Brothers in nineteen oh eight, andmade the first purchase of planes for the
military. He authored books on radioand electricity. His chief signal officer in
World War One, Big Deal Guyfounded the precursor of the US Air Force.

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Square also invented multiplexing, a processthat allows several phone conversations to be
compressed into one signal a single wire, and then decompressed on the other end,
and this was a huge deal.It made modern telecommunications possible got him
inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. This compression is the reason that hold

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music sounds terrible. By the way, yes, I'm planning an episode on
hold music. But Square realized thatuncompressed music over wires would work just as
well as human voices, and innineteen twenty two he founded Wired Radio Incorporated
to provide music to subscribers in theirhomes. Radio was still young in the
twenties and required expensive equipment that mostpeople didn't have, so Wired Radio brought

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music into their homes through the electricallines. I don't know how that worked,
but it did. And in nineteenthirty four, just weeks before his
death, General Square changed the nameof the company, inspired by the made
up name Kodak. He changed wiredradio to Musak. As radio technology caught
up and the price came down,broadcast radio started to eclipse the home market,

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and the company shifted focus to businesses, hotels, restaurants, and retailers,
all those public spaces. So you'dwalk into the Waldorf Astoria and hear
the Xavier Cougat orchestra coming out ofa potted pond. This is also the

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era of the first skyscrapers, andby the nineteen forties there's one place in
the Chrysler Building and the Empire Stateand the Tribune Tower in Chicago where you
were most likely to hear Musak.In the elevators. Now there's a reason

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for that, but there's a story. First, until the Second World War,
elevators never had music, but theyalmost always had elevator operators. They'd
open and close the doors, controlledthe direction and the speed of the elevator
car, ease it into a gracefulstop on each floor. Take floor requests

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from the passengers and announce what businessesor departments were on each floor ninth floor
lingerie. As buildings got taller throughthe twenties and thirties and forties, from
ten stories to more than one hundred, the elevator became more and more essential.
But elevator operators were horribly underpaid,with twelve hour workdays in the nineteen

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twenties, no lunch break, andno days off. So in April nineteen
twenty seventeen, thousand elevator operators inNew York City went on strike. Call
at once, all at once.Yeah, that's how strikes work. To
get to the upper floors, buildingtenants started running the elevators themselves, and
a New York Times article that samemonth notes that several people had been killed

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while these untrained operators were at thecontrols. A messenger boy by the name
of Nelson was instantly killed yesterday afternoonwhen he became wedged between an elevator shaft
and freight lift on the seventh floorof the building at twenty Vesey Street,
said the article. It was setat Union headquarters that a woman had been
killed in an elevator accident at onetwenty two fifth Avenue and so on.

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These periodic elevator strikes continued to paralyzecities every few years all the way through
the Second World War and a fewyears after. And then in the early
nineteen fifties, the Otis Elevator Companybegan designing and field testing automatic elevators in
skyscrapers in New York and Chicago,and everybody was terrified of them. Everyone

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remembered the stories of people mangled byelevators during the strikes, with untrained people
at the controls. But get onan elevator with nobody at the controls and
then go shooting up into the sky. We might as well get into a
driverless car. So Otis teamed upwith Muzak to pipe soothing, bland orchestral
music into elevators to calm the nervesof passengers, And that is where the

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term elevator music came from. Drivenby a slogan that said Musak fills the
deadly silences, music was now ina quest to push its soundtracks into every
monetizable human environment. It may notbe a coincidence that this is also the

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period of wallpaper film scoring, inwhich nearly every frame of every movie has
an orchestra pumping out sound. Areyou going to take the carriage or the
brown mare? I don't think thatwould be better. You'll be careful,

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won't you. I don't want anythingto happen to you. That's an interesting
chicken and egg question. Did Muzakcreate the expectation that every human moment should
have a soundtrack in the movies roseto that expectation or vice versa, or

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were they just both answering the sameperceived need. I don't know. In
the late nineteen forty, someone atMuzak discovered an uninvaded country the workplace.
Encouraged by research that showed music havinga physiological influence on behavior, Musak invented
the stimulus progression, a day longprogram of music meant to boost office and

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factory workers' productivity by gradually changing tempoand energy. Musak executive David O'Neil put
it this way. When the employeearrives in the morning, he is generally
in a good mood and the musicwill be calm. Toward ten thirty,
he begins to feel a little tiredand tense, so we give him a
lift with the appropriate music. Towardthe middle of the afternoon, he's probably

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feeling tired again. We wake himup again with a rhythmic tune, often
faster than the mornings. Despite havingpretty much no real science behind it,
the stimulus progression continued for decades asmanagement tried to squeeze more and more productivity
out of workers. Here's a dippindivesample of a stimulus progression track from nineteen

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seventy six. Eisenhower introduced music tothe White House. JFK had it on

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air Force one. Lyndon Johnson ownedthe Austin, Texas franchise of music.
It also pushed into retail environments withmusic program to get you spending more.
Forget about disco and classic rock.This was the inescapable everyday soundtrack of the
seventies. Music often drew on musicfrom a genre called beautiful music, an

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actual genre related to easy listening,but distinguished by being all instrumental and always
always including strings. Beautiful music airquotes would take existing music, classical,
jazz standards, even very current pop, arrange it into a string heavy orchestra
and iron out all contrast and surprises. There were radio stations set up with

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beautiful music programming, and my parentslisten to it all the time. This
is WHPFM beautiful ninety seven to three. These stations had massive ratings all through

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the seventies and eighties. They wereoften at number one or two in their
city's markets. There is something insidiousabout the juxtaposition of what was going on
in the world in the seventies andthis bath of happy time auditory denialism we

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were always swimming in today that Nationalguardsmen gunned down unarmed activists on the campus
of Kent State University. It isestimated that more than thirty thousand people were
killed during the coup on Capitol Hill. The House Judiciary Committee started a formal

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inquiry into whether it should approve theimpeachment of the president. Palestinian gunmen took
eleven athletes, coaches, and officialsof the Israeli team hostage inside the Olympian
Nopek oil embargo led to an internationalshortage and rocked the global Nightmare at Jonestown

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left more than nine hundred members ofthe People's Temple changed. When Paul Pott's
murderous Khmer rouge took power in Cambodianmore than fifty eight thousand Americans were killed
over two decades of the Vietnam War. This contrast was captured brilliantly in One

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Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when, in the midst of the literal insanity
of the psych ward, the nurseannounces medication time and the needle drops on
a classic of the beautiful music genre, Motavani's Charmain. Beyond the prozac effective

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music, the possibility of subliminal effectson behavior continued to both worry some experts
and intrigue retailers. In a famousnineteen ninety nine study, researchers played French
and German music on alternate days ina wine shop, and they found that
on days when French music was played, shoppers were more likely to buy French

(16:41):
wine and more German wine on Germanmusic days. When shoppers were asked about
their experiences in the wine shop,they said they were unaware of the music
and the effect that it was havingon their behavior. An experiment in nineteen
eighty two played background music with varyingtempos in supermarket and tracked the speed of

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customers as they shopped, as wellas the supermarket's daily profits. They found
that uptempo music made shoppers move morequickly through the store, giving less time
for impulse buys. Slower music hadthe opposite effect, people slowed down and
bought more, with significantly higher dailyprofits. There's so many reasons to dislike

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the intrusion of music into every cornerof our lives. One is that,
as the French writer Pascal quin Yardputs it in a book called The Hatred
of Music, ears have no eyelids. That's perfect. You can close your
eyes to visual overstimulation, but soundgets in. It's the reason you don't
care if an ugly car drives byat three in the morning, but you're

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furious if a loud one does.But the thing I disliked the most about
the modern bath of inescapable public musicis how unobjectionable it usually is. The
music is carefully selected to be fine, not the best, not the most

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interesting, just unobjectionable. We aresaturated in middling sound, chasing away silence,
without adding anything of value, asidefrom maybe our utility as compliant units
of working and spending. Doctor GaryGumpert, a communications professor at Queen's College,
said in nineteen ninety that music isquote a kind of amniotic fluid that

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surrounds us. It never startles us. It is never too loud, it
is never too silent. It's alwaysthere. Now, there has been some
pushback over the years against the uninvitedintrusion of music into daily life. During
a short time in the nineteen fiftieswhen music was piped into buses and trains

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in Washington, d C. Alawsuit was fine claiming that too little was
known about the subliminal effects, andin nineteen ninety two a campaign called pipe
down was launched in the UK againstplaying background music in public establishments. Thirty
two years later, they're still atit, arguing not only that forced public

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music is an intrusion on us,but that using music as a marketing tool
or as acoustic wallpaper quote debases musicitself, turning one of life's great pleasures
into the opposite. Absolutely correct.Although ambient public music is still very much
a thing, the ability to carrymusic of your choice with you has been

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growing for decades, from the walkmanin nineteen seventy nine to the iPod in
two thousand and one, to smartphonesin seven to Bluetooth and Spotify. Now
we're still filling the deadly silences,but at least it's the wallpaper of our
choice. That was episode sixty sixof How Music Does That? Thanks for

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listening. I'm Dale mc gowan.See you next time, whenever that may
be for How Music Does That