Audio Architecture

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During the 1960s, Muzak began to shift its attention, calling itself “environmental,” thereby acting as a sensory stimulant adding a coloration to a space. Two decades later, then-owner Teleprompter sold Muzak to Westinghouse. The new management immediately updated the library, bringing Muzak to the foreground for the first time, playing original songs, not reorchestrated renditions. Muzak even allowed symbolism. To commemorate the return of the hostages from Iran, it played “God Bless America” several times a day.

Muzak now faces individuals with a changed sensorium. The constant flow of changes across society has made us less responsive to any particular change. Research shows that over time, our sensorium has grown more able to tolerate the shock of the new. Once shocking, both skyscrapers and sprawl have become everyday. This condition is also evidenced by changes in our relationship to music. While Elvis was radical in the 50’s, he is background today. The speed by which we assimilate newness in musical culture has increased greatly over the last twenty years. Played over and over, ”God Save the Queen” and “Like A Virgin” have become tunes we hum along with absent-mindedly, their message sublimated. These popular hits work the same way that Muzak’s earlier instrumentals did, acting as a stimulating but blank texture within the empty spaces of work and consumption.

When present, emotion becomes sublimated into affect that can be turned on and off at will. Violently rejecting the hippie ethic of free love and peace to the world, punk rock was the last musical or cultural movement that presented an alternative emotion. By the late 1970s, New Wave attempted to strip out emotion. Thus if John Lennon’s 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” was a raw wound, informed by Arthur Yanov’s Primal Scream Therapy which sought to break through the veneer of rationalism that modern, Fordist created through the aural expression of accumulated pain. In contrast, Tears for Fears 1983 “the Hurting” addressed the same theme but now via the nearly inflectionless lines of a synthepop dance song: “Shout, shout/Let it all out./These are the things I can do without./Come on./I’m talking to you./So come on.” Ten years later, the commercial acceptance of Kurt Cobain points out how all resistance, sadness, and pain can be experienced as affect today. With Nirvana, alienation was no longer a matter of struggle but rather could be accepted as a mood or intensity. Even prior to Cobain’s death in 1994, Muzak had created an instrumental version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Cobain’s inheritance is “Emo Rock” which reduces emotion to a genre. No longer does music have to be as inflectionless as New Wave. Now it can mime emotion and we can be comforted knowing it is just affect we can plug in and out of at will throughout the course of our day.

Always ahead of the curve, by the 1980s, Muzak abandoned the Stimulus Progression in favor of “Audio Architecture.” At this point, the amount of stimulation received in the daily environment far exceeded any ability of the engineers at Muzak to modulate such forces. Over-stimulated, individuals can no longer be affected by increases in data alone. Muzak’s programmers no longer style themselves as engineers or scientists. Instead they harness this excess of data to become “Audio Architects” a term that indicates that they construct environments, but that Muzak is as much art as science.

The sensorial overload of contemporary culture means that even original songs are no longer distracting. Today most of Muzak’s channels broadcast originals, not reorchestrated versions. The result is that Muzak’s audio programming has become even more invisible: if the music is audible, its source is no longer discernable.

The culture industries have made it possible for even the most wild and subversive content to be consumed by everyone. With repeated airplay, song lyrics lose their meaning, turning all music into a background of moods without emotional depth. Today, in a radically segmented demographic market, Muzak’s customers can choose from a variety of programs that include all forms of music, picking the channels and moods most appropriate to their audience’s needs and can request custom selections designed to enhance their unique brand personality.

Next: Atmospherics