A Median Level of Arousal

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During the twentieth century wars were key catalysts for technological and social advancement. In the First World War, Squier significantly advanced the radio and the airplane while the principles of Taylorism and Fordism spread widely in industry both in the United States and abroad in the First World War. During the Second World War, the military sponsored scientific research and stimulated management techniques to improve productivity. In particular, the military undertook extensive research into the playing of music in office and factory environments. These studies, often undertaken by employees of Muzak and its competitors, concluded that silence during repetitive tasks led to boredom while talking was too distracting. Music, on the other hand, did not draw the eye’s attention away from the task at hand but alleviated fatigue arising from monotonous actions. The general conclusion of these studies suggested that music affects the body physiologically, stimulating breathing, metabolism, muscular energy, pulse, blood pressure, and internal secretions.

This fit neatly with the James-Lange theory about how to influence the emotions, popular during wartime. Developed independently by William James and Carl Lange, the James-Lange theory states that the human nervous system creates automatic changes with regard to experiences in the world. Only once one feels a rise in heart rate, an increase in perspiration, dryness of the mouth, and so on does one experience emotion. By affecting the body physiologically, background music could keep workers’ nervous systems calm and thereby giving them greater emotional stability during the difficult days of wartime.

Starting during the “baptism by fire” of the British during 1940, the BBC’s “Music While You Work” program broadcast music made by two live bands to factories daily to prevent workers from dwelling on their predicament and to soothe them upon returning to work after a night of bombing. Soon after, music was made mandatory for all British war workers. By 1943, some 6 million American workers listened to music in the factory provided by Muzak, RCA, General Electric or other audio programming providers and by war’s end some 5 million British workers listened to “Music While You Work.”

After the war, corporations continued to be interested in using music to improve productivity. At Muzak, company researchers who had been involved In wartime research came to the conclusion that in addition to the vague increase in productivity that music in the workplace created by the Hawthorne Effect, the James-Lange theory suggested that music could more deliberately affect the changing attention levels of workers throughout the day to maintain a steady level of productivity. While Taylorist work practices streamlined industrial manufacturing and office work, they also made these jobs even more monotonous. Without direct supervision, the fatigue and boredom brought about by repetitive tasks could quickly undo the very advances that these new practices hoped to provide. Muzak researchers concluded that varying the tempo of music played to workers throughout the workday was one way of fighting fatigue. According to one of the fundamental observations of modern industrial psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson Law, first developed by Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson in 1908, optimal performance is attained with a median level of arousal. Too much arousal distracts the worker while too little leads to inertia. The sources of arousal in the office environment can take many forms, and include negative stimuli like stress and anxiety as well as pleasure and comfort or even, as the Hawthorne Effect proved, the act of scientific monitoring itself. The key isn’t each moment of arousal itself, but the flow from one moment to the next, and the variation of arousal types. Complex work inherently is more engaging and therefore requires less distraction from background music while simple work, being less arousing, requires a greater degree of complexity from the music.

next: the Stimulus Progression