Muzak Music In Public Places By Robert S. Babin

OUR LOSS OF BLESSED QUIET There was a time easily within the fond memories of millions of us when there was no ceiling music in restaurants. Until the 1950s, while having a meal in any restaurant in the world you could be sure that no music would be sprayed down on you from ceiling speakers. There was blessed quiet. Without having to raise your voice over irritating, interfering music you could easily carry on a relaxed, amiable conversation with your dinner partners or chat with your waiter. While eating alone, you could relax and gather your thoughts or enjoy reading a book or magazine in quiet repose. Critics rated restaurants for excellence on how quiet they were. Everywhere it was a sensible, traditional premise of restaurant management that patrons wanted a peaceful, relaxing, quiet environment for their meals. No one wanted unceasing music of any kind! Quiet was found not only in restaurants in those sensible, rational times. On the telephone we did not have to endure annoying music when we were put on hold; instead there was glorious silence, during which we could think without interference. In waiting rooms, elevators, and lobbies and on trains, busses, and streetcars, there was blessed quiet; no irritating blare of music spewed from the ceilings. Never did we have to endure insufferable, absurd, repetitious lyrics—”Baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, baybi, gimmi lovin’, gimmi lovin’, gimmi lovin’ evah naht”—wailed in great emotional frenzy to the violent crashes of drums and guitars. Years ago we all liked music and enjoyed hearing it frequently. There was an abundance of music in enormous variety, all that we could possibly want. We all had our own radios and phonographs. We played our own selections of music at times when we wished to hear them, at a volume and tone that pleased us, on equipment that measured up to our standards of fidelity. And of course we enjoyed good music at movies and live-music performances that we chose to attend. There was no “public” music, by which I mean music chosen by someone else and played at a time of their choosing, at their choice of volume, through their shoddy sound systems, and forced upon us as a captive audience. That offensive fouling of the air and assaulting of our peace of mind had not yet begun in America. In those lovely, quiet times no sane person wanted continuous, public music. None of us in his worst nightmare had ever imagined so grotesque an idea! Who in his right mind would have requested non-stop, public music to be played during every restaurant meal he would eat for the rest of his life? Who in full possession of his mental faculties would have desired to have someone else’s music be continually sprayed down on him, without let-up, whenever he rode an elevator, bus, or streetcar or waited for his dentist or doctor? What rational person would have requested that for the rest of his life an uninterrupted blast of loud, public music fill the air in every clothing store, shoe store, bookstore, drugstore, bakery, and supermarket, in every bowling alley, Laundromat, gymnasium, and swimming pool, in every gas station and car wash, in every barber shop and beauty salon, in every bar, liquor store, fastfood stand, at every wedding reception and cocktail party, at every picnic, sidewalk sale, street fair, or public outing he ever attends, and in every lobby and waiting room he ever occupies. That is exactly the situation today. Non-stop music drowns us in public places. Everywhere it is continuous music, with never a let up, not even a half-minute break. If criminal executions were once again made public, some idiot would surely arrange to have loud, non-stop rock music sprayed continually on all in attendance!

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How did our beloved quiet disappear? Why? Who among us really wants all this never-ending noise pollution? How did we get here in the first place? Let me tell you. America’s much appreciated silence first fell under attack in the 1940s when some ambitious folks at a company whose name isn’t important—so I’ll call it “M”—saw a fast buck to be made. First they dug up some extremely spotty, highly questionable experimental data that somebody was willing to interpret as suggesting that perhaps ten or fifteen minutes of music each hour in a factory might improve the workers’ productivity. Using that suspect data, M’s aggressive salesmen were able to convince a few factory managers to install overhead speakers to provide occasional music for their production-line workers. The idea of factory music caught on, and in a few years it became standard on all American production lines. In the half-century since then, two generations of factory workers have never thought to ask why music sprays down over their heads all day. They’ve never known any other way! Many experts now conclude that the continuous music in the factory actually degrades workers’ attentiveness and causes them to make serious, even dangerous assembly errors, while making no improvement whatever in productivity. But the music stays on, mainly because employee unions won’t let management shut it off. But that is beside the point here. What is important is that M’s aggressive salesmen next targeted the nation’s restaurants. M recognized that most people working in restaurants are bored most of the time and that many of them, particularly the younger ones, yearn for something to relieve their tedium. They would like to turn their thoughts away from slinging hash and hustling drinks to more exhilarating activities like dancing, drinking, doping, and sex. M recognized that ceiling music could very effectively serve that role. So how did they sell ceiling music to restaurant managers? They deceptively alleged that restaurant customers would enjoy M’s so-called “background” music. It didn’t take much highpressure selling to get ceiling speakers installed in thousands of restaurants to play M’s “piped-in” music for a few dollars a month—all done officially for the restaurant patrons’ comfort and enjoyment. It did not matter that at the time, no restaurant patrons wanted continuous ceiling music during their meals and that none, except a few on-the-make teen-agers, had ever suggested it! In the beginning, even M never envisaged non-stop restaurant music. Its original restaurant schedules called for a quarter hour of mellow, tasteful, low-volume music played on a high-fidelity, single-speaker sound system, followed by 30 minutes of silence. I well remember enjoying that intelligent, entertaining, on-off arrangement while eating in first-class restaurants in New York and Washington, D.C. in the early 1950s. But in just a few years that nicety was abandoned in favor of non-stop music spewing from wall-to-wall speakers from opening time until closing, with the volume set high. What had begun as part-time, low-level, unobtrusive, background music quickly evolved into full-time, loud, interfering, foreground music. Eventually not only every restaurant but every other public room and auditorium nationwide was wired for ceiling speakers and public music, either piped-in or locally generated. Today there are extremely few public places you can visit and not have to endure non-stop public music, the bulk of it loud, frantic rock music. Just as cigarettes are to chain-smokers, loud, non-stop rock music has become an addiction for many people. Millions of them apparently need desperately to page 2 of 4

hear that constant music beat in their ears, without respite, from the moment they wake up until they switch off at bedtime or fall asleep with it left on. That addictive madness is beyond my understanding, so let me return to restaurant music. By the mid 1960s M and its several competitors had turned ceiling music into a multi-milliondollar business, and all the nation’s architects had gotten into line. Without exception the blueprints for every new restaurant provided for ceiling music. Today all but a few of the very oldest restaurants have a dozen or more ceiling speakers strategically placed so there is absolutely nowhere you can sit to be more than a few feet from one of those noise boxes. You have to search hard to find any eatery in America without non-stop ceiling music. Not one in a thousand is without it! Your only hope of having a pleasant, peaceful, quiet meal is to find a very old restaurant or, with exceptional luck, one whose noise box is temporarily out of order. When you travel in Europe and eat in some of the lovely, quiet, old restaurants there you can appreciate the utter absurdity of non-stop ceiling music. To avoid paying for piped-in music while at the same time adding to customer discomfort, many American restaurants connect up their own radio to the ceiling speakers and tune to a commercial station to get continuous rock music. (Non-commercial stations do not play continuous rock.) Often the cook or the manager or one of their girlfriends decides which rock station to tune in and how high to crank up the volume. Between blasts of tooth-jarring rock music we are assailed by sickening commercial announcements while we eat. Blaring sales pitches, shouted slogans, and ear-grating jingles graphically describe for us the nauseating details of under-arm deodorants, women’s sanitary napkins, throw-away diapers, bad-breath gargles, denture glues, laxatives, diarrhea cures, anti-gas pills, itching creams, incontinence pads, and the ever popular Preparation H hemorrhoidal suppositories. These juicy announcements are all served up, hour after hour, right along with those tasty burgers and fries, folks! If you politely ask a restaurant manager to turn off his radio—even for just a few minutes while you finish your meal—he will very likely refuse, saying that to please you he would have to deprive all his other customers of their joy of music listening. Ask him how he thinks his customers are enjoying the Kotex, Feenamint, and Preparation H commercials while they’re eating, and he is likely to take personal offense. In any event you can be sure he will not turn the music off. If he did, his employees would give him holy hell; some would threaten to quit. Instead of the radio, some restaurants play the piped-in music from M or one of its competitors. Without the radio commercials the noise pollution is a little easier for us to endure, but, like the restaurant radios, it is invariably played at a volume level that is too high for pleasant conversation and enjoyable, relaxed eating. Typically the volume level to please the deafest of the restaurant employees, many of whom have permanently impaired hearing from attending live, pounding, kilowatt-level, rock-music concerts. Ask a waitress or the hostess or the manager in any restaurant to please turn the music volume down so you can have a pleasant conversation with your companions, and you will likely be told (each of these is from my personal experience): - “We can’t get to the volume control. It’s locked up.” - “The volume is not adjustable. It’s set by M.” - “None of us is allowed to change it; only the boss can adjust it, and he’s not here now.” - “That’s as low as we can set the volume.”

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There may be some truth in some of those responses, but overall they reflect the restaurant employees’ unwillingness to lower the music volume for fear they will miss hearing it, even temporarily. The concept of not hearing it, even for just a few minutes, is alien to them. For them that would be like turning off the air conditioning on a sweltering hot day. The obvious fact is that in America’s restaurants today most employees—the manager, hostess, cooks, waiters, bartenders, and busboys—are in an uninterrupted state of musical concert!. Nonstop music listening is their indispensable continuum. They cannot function without it. It must be played unceasingly and loud enough for them to hear it clearly over the “interfering” sounds of their work: sounds such as taking customers’ orders, preparing and serving food and drinks, stacking dishes, making change, and the other activities that are earning their pay. When they have to shout to each other and to their customers to be heard over the music, they shout. When the music is so loud they cannot hear us giving our food orders, they insist that we speak louder and repeat. All day long they mandatorily require an uninterrupted dose of musical Pabulum for the brain. Everything else is of secondary importance. When customers are displeased and made irritable by the music, so be it. Some customers will leave in disgust, never to return, but the music cannot ever be shut off, even for a moment, under any circumstances. Customers be damned, restaurant employees will not interrupt or even lower the volume of their crucially important, non-interruptible, never-ending musical “fix!” IN AMERICAN RESTAURANTS, ADDICTIVE, NON-STOP, WALL-TO-WALL MUSIC LISTENING HAS PRIORITY OVER COMMON-SENSE RESTAURANTING! Mind you, this pathetic hoax was begun and still continues under the preposterous pretense of pleasing the customer!

Robert S. Babin 25 July 1996 /var/www/apps/pdfcoke/pdfcoke/tmp/scratch5/8513104.doc

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