Whilst thinking about ‘What is background music’ – which is the working title for my audio paper. I began asking myself questions related to commerce, thinking most notably about my experience in customer service. I have worked most of my twenties in customer service roles which were usually quite busy and I often have this thought that my experience working within a busy music venue really shaped how I listen to music. I found it quite exhausting to have music on constantly when I wasn’t aware of the artist or song. Stuck in this space through my contract to society. There is pressure from your colleagues to put ‘upbeat’ music on. I also ran a DJ night which plays old experimental pop and private press these choices are catered to what a large group of people partying would possibly want to hear. My tastes gravitated towards music from the 70s and 80s, mostly featuring synthesizers, mostly kitsch and playful but with interesting sounds. A lot of Japanese New-Wave and experimental jazz-funk from Europe. A lot of this music had no vocals, if it did they were mostly not speaking English. I wonder how much my job and that environment shaped the choices I made musically. When I would work, I would crave these upbeat sounds and when I was finishing work, exhausted, I would listen to more ambient or avant-garde music to help me think or re-sync with my general mood. With Stimulus Progression, it was proved in Muzak that you could use music to encourage workers to work harder subconsciously, now the controls belong to the employee and a lot of us chose to engage with this use of music as a means to power through a bad work experience. In a sense, when we got portable headphones, we in affect gained control parameters to our environments. We can cover the sound of loud people having fun in our workspaces with music we like and use that music to transport us to a happier place, but also, we can forget we are on a train with an iPod, or forget we are waiting in a quiet, awkward space. We can drown out the unwanted sounds of our urban spaces. – accept if you are working in one, and happen to not be in charge of your own soundtrack I don’t know what is worse, being allowed to have a soundtrack and your own taste being absorbed by the brand you represent or being subjected to whatever music your manager or boss deems appropriate, either way music for the worker is forced to become an engagement tool or a kind of subliminal dialect.
“Hearing immerses the subject, vision offers a perspective” – Jonathan Sterne
With headphones, we can interject our own space into the locality. This blog post does a good job of describing this nuance of a headphone listen.
https://8sided.blog/tag/william-gibson/
In this blog post by Michael Donaldsom, he talks about how headphones have affected our listening – this discussion inspired by a quote by the science fiction writer William Gibson who said about the Sony Walkman;
“The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful at being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture”
William Gibson, 1993 Interview
Donaldson goes on to ponder how the portable sound recorder changed our perception of space. As we walk through these landscapes with our own soundtrack, we are freed from unwanted interaction or interference, we are left only with our chosen space. It’s actually impossible to talk about any kind of situational listening habits of the 21st century without speaking about iPods or Walkmans. If I were to talk about playlist culture, automated playlists and ‘beats to study to’ – it’s hard to ignore that music on the go is a tool to shut off from unwanted distraction or walk through a street undisturbed and as this post concludes, most listeners aren’t ‘sitting in a dark room with their headphones plugged into a record player’ anymore most of my more intent listening experiences usually happen on walks personally.
Stockhausen ‘tuning cities into being more harmonious’
Some quotes from the book ‘Shopping’ from the LCC library that stood out;
“If Mall’s are virtual cities constructed in the nostalgic image of a clean, safe, legible town centre, multiplex cinemas have become virtual malls, retailing a commodified real. The shopping mall remains what Michel Foucault has called a heterotopia – a heterogeneous social space in which ‘all other real sites that can be found within the culutre are simultaneously repsented, contested, and inverted”
Anne Friedberg, The Shopper’s Gaze, Shopping
“Jean Baudrillard’s theoretical hyperreal is a descriptive diagnosis of our cultural dyslexia, the casual grounding of which came first is lost in a chain of signage, the cultural consdequence of the predominant visual forms of the twentieth century – the cinematic and televisual – has been to produce an ingrained virtuality of the senses where our experience of space and time and the real are removed to the plane of representation”
“… today it is not production but consumption that is considered to be the citizen’s primary duty. In times of crisis and war, modern politicans no longer demand that one should be thrifty and tighten one’s belt still further, but, on the contrary, that one should buy more, so that the economy can keep running.” – Boris Groys, The Artist As Consumer, Shopping
Was wondering whether my audio paper could take a dive into consumerist cultural theory territory. With every quote I find I fear I pick up more sources to explore…
In the book ‘Elevator Music’ by Joseph Lanza.
“As the industrial revolution introduced the internal combustion engines roar and the drone of generators, ventilation systems, riveting pistons, and low-frequency electrical lighting, silence became an unwelcome anomaly when it existed at all. There erupted a whole new genus of criminal activty and factory-related illnessses connected with these noisy incursions, such as “boiler maker’s disease” produced by metal scrapting. Music was not mere entertainment but an “audioanalgesia” to kill the pain of urban din”
Joseph Lanza
When thinking of the effect Muzak and background music has had on people today, I was looking at this from the perspective of the internet – but researching a little bit, I feel this change is far more nuanced – the initial causality of sound theory seems routed in the industrial revolution – when suddenly the soundscape changed very noticeably. Then the commercialisation of recorded music was a massive cultural shift (including cinema) and later the portable sound system; The Boombox, almost like a portable sound installation. The Walkman, an excursion from the space, our environment becomes distanced, our space is piped with our own Muzak. Finally, Information Age and it’s continued development; playlist culture, streaming software, podcasts, social media – all of which have an effect on our listening. Our ‘echo-chambers’ or ‘bubbles’ perhaps not limited to a set of political content we are more likely to engage with, but also what media…
“Karlheinz Stockhausen later suggested using computer-programmed “sound swallowers to neutralize every unwated noise in a public place with it’s opposite vibration” – a prophetic statement in light of the noise cancelling headphone technology we have today.