Aeolian Harp, a greek invention. Mentioned in Joseph Lanza’s ‘Elevator Music’. It has it’s origins in Greek mythology, Homers says that Hermes had created a lyre from dried sinews and a tortoise shell that could be ‘played by the wind’. This Aleatoric instrument has existed in myth and ancient culture but was first written about Athanius Kircher in the 17th Century.
The concept of Muzak stimulus progression in the workplace was born through World War II, where it was used to boost morale on production lines. ‘Work Song’ are usually rhythmically orientated folk songs sang between labourers to sync there movements. These have probably existed for thousands of years. Work Song has dramatically declined in use as our world has gotten louder, with most labouring jobs now aided with large mechanisms and the introduction of recorded music into society. So music has always had a role within manual jobs, and bizarrely with muzak it has entered a new field of work. With Work Song manual labourers are actively participating in the work and the act of work becomes almost a performance. In a sense, this is what happens with background music in the workplace, as our pop culture experience of radio dramas and movies subconsciously turns us into the star of some sort of play. It’s interesting to me how fresh this idea of ‘background music’ was. As reading Toop’s Ocean of Sound and relating to my own experience as a listener; I listen to wide varieties of music, and sometimes I will stick on a playlist or radio show of a certain genre or ‘play all uploads’ on a youtube channel owned by a virtual crate digger. – The desire here is to hear something new within a set of parameters, I personally do not intend to listen to forgettable music, but in my desire to digest ‘everything’ I do. You often stumble across playlists without a tracklist and I often wonder the intent, whether it’s a collectors’ fragile need to hold onto their own discoveries to claim more ownership over them. Or whether it’s just that the listeners aren’t after new artists to find and explore. What they actually want is a mood to have on in the background. This commodification of genre shows how Muzak is almost ahead of the curve. With the increasing availability of apps and services that aim to compartmentalize our lives for sake of comfort & luxury. It’s less about seeking out and finding specific things and more about picking an approximation. In the way that Muzak with it’s 1001 Strings and lack of vocals invited people of old to be lost in a story of themselves, where they are the protagonist, it’s closest relative might be the movie and tv soundtracks contemporary to the time. The themes are songs they had picked up through their own life experiences and times in their lives that they are subconsciously harked back to framed like a flashback in a story.