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.