Passport to Dreams Old & New: It was the early 1920s, and George O. Squier had an idea. George had spent a lifetime as an inventor and tinkerer for the US Army - he had invented the method for carrying multiple conversations over a single wire, allowing for the rise of a functional national telephone system, and had flown in one of the Wright Brothers' earliest aircrafts. Now, he wanted to apply his way with wires to send music to homes, offices, factories, and ballrooms across the country. George took the final two letters from "Kodak" and applied it to "music" to end up with "Muzak".
3 comments:
I have never thought of a time where listening to music behind work was just not a thing. I’m listening to music right now while I am typing this comment ( How Far I’ll Go from the Moana soundtrack lol). But to think that before radios were a thing music just want in the home unless it was live music. Elevator music is in a genre of its own. It was created for a specific purpose and a lot of thought was actually put into the creation of it and the timing of it. The importance of making music that was unobtrusive to the listeners was one of the most important criteria for the production of Musack. The thought that went into the production and composition of that music must have been so cool. Another part of this article that I found very interesting was the type of music they played at different times of day. Thought was put into what they played when in order to help with peoples productivity and continue with the theme of playing unobtrusive music. Now, I don’t think this is a thought that goes through radio stations minds. They just play the most popular songs nonmatter what time it is. Sometimes you hear blaring EDM music at 3am when you are just like ‘nah not in the mood for this’. But I also think that this could be partly in response to the fact that as time has gone on technology has allowed for more AM and FM radio stations to be broadcasted along with the prevalence of satellite radio therefore the quantity of music and other programs being broadcasted has increased exponentially. In the teens and twenties there weren’t many stations so you were stuck with what the available stations were playing so they were more conscious to what the listener wanted. Now you can just flip the station to hundreds of other possible stations when you don’t like the song on one station. Radio music and the history of broadcasting music is fascinating to me and I could write this comment for days, but I have to move on to my next comment now
This article was way more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I never realized that the original Muzak was "scientifically selected mood music". I think that its so interesting that different types of Muzak were created specifically for different types of day. I also think it's interesting how the mainstreaming of Muzak turned it into muzak – as if a company lost the monopoly of production – and then have it go back to Muzak when it became less popular. Mood music was "social programming" – that is, purposely creating calming music for certain atmospheres that is appealing to the people looking to purchase music for those atmospheres – being traded around and marketed for profit by corporations. In a way, it is almost like creating a soundscape, as you would for a show, that blends in so well with the story, you barely realize its there, but it makes the theatrical world seem so much more real. Sound is a part of the theatre world I would love to get to learn more about.
Background music is too often boiled down to "elevator music"; subsequently it has been frequently derided. I feel background music actually has cultural significance and in many ways has come to frame our daily life. Imagining a world without background music is hard. It is pervasive to the point that silence - when it does arrive - is uncomfortable. I think the notion of background music as a form of "social programming" is an interesting one. Indeed there are a variety of studies that correlate music to emotional response, and changes in perception. And yet, because we exist in a culture today that so prizes music and the music scene, I feel as though that sense of "social programming" has gone away. Instead, background music as it stands today is simply a manifestation of the music culture we revere and prize so much. The elevators of today sound - and feel - entirely different than the elevators of the past.
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