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The mysteries of Muzak

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
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Edward Moyer
2 min read
If you'd asked us awhile back to think of a precursor to such newsy tech offerings as iTunes, Napster, satellite radio and BPL (broadband over power lines), we probably wouldn't have settled on Muzak.

But after reading an intriguing wiki created by the L.A.-based Architecture Urbanism Design Collaborative, we're humming a different tune. The wiki looks at the evolution of the vapid "elevator music" that turned the supermarkets of our youth into dreamy rat mazes for somnambulistic shoppers. And the AUDC says Muzak was originally intended as a kind of subscription service that would be piped into people's homes with the help of utility lines.

Really.

This utopian vision of commercial-free music for the masses was the brainchild of one General George Squier, and Squier planned it around a technology he invented in the early 1900s. An interesting fellow (he was, for instance, one of the first-ever passengers on an airplane), Squier was so disgusted by privatization that he patented his invention in the name of the American public, making it available for free use and development--and trumping the free and open-source software movements by about a hundred years.

Squier isn't the only colorful character to be found in the AUDC wiki, nor are these the only fascinating facts. So despite some inconsistencies with Wikipedia, and regardless of whatever aversion you might have to this particular musical genre, the AUDC effort is well worth a peek.

Among other tidbits:

• Though Squier's original plan never worked out, Musak did wind up getting piped into offices. This gibed "with the vision Squier had left for the (Muzak) company. As (an) officer of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Squier used music to increase the productivity of his secretaries. Afterward, he investigated ways to use music...to soothe the nerves of employees while increasing their output. The idea of using music to improve an environment was not uncommon by the 1930s, when dentists used music to augment or even replace anesthetic."

• "Muzak soon proved useful...beyond the office or factory floor. As skyscrapers reached ever taller in North American cities, building owners employed Muzak to calm anxious elevator riders; quickly earning Muzak's programs the name "elevator music."

• "Muzak researchers concluded that varying the tempo of music played to workers throughout the workday was one way of fighting fatigue." The key was to maintain a "median level of arousal," an idea that led to the "Stimulus Progression."

• "The Stimulus Progression was based on the human heartbeat. Playing music at a rate above that of the heartbeat--an average of 72 beats per minute at rest--stimulated the individual, but constantly doing so would make them nervous."

• "Composed almost exclusively of love songs stripped of their lyrics, (Muzak programs based on) the Stimulus Progression provided (to workers) a gentle state of erotic arousal throughout the day."

Hmmm. Perhaps Muzak was a precursor to yet another present-day innovation: nonharassment training.