Interlude. Music Nobody Listens To

Thaddeus Cahill dreamed of selling music over wires, like gas and water, and went bust because his two-hundred-ton machine bled into other people’s telephone conversations. Fifteen or so years later a general made the same dream come true. George Owen Squier, chief of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, had worked out back in 1910 how to send several signals down one telephone line at once, and in 1922 he founded a company that delivered music to subscribers over electrical wires. In 1934 he renamed it, gluing the word music to the name of the most fashionable camera brand of the day, Kodak. That is how the word Muzak came about. Squier died that same spring and did not live to see 1936, when the first customers heard Muzak in their offices.

The music from the wires was meant for people who don’t listen to it. From the fifties to the eighties Muzak sold offices and factories a program built on a scale the company called stimulus progression. For fifteen minutes music played, gradually speeding up and getting louder to push the work along, after which fifteen minutes of silence followed so that the ear would not tire. Muzak played in the White House under Eisenhower and Johnson and, by some accounts, in NASA’s space programs, and in English its name became a generic word for any background music. Everywhere it was called elevator music, even though the company supplied nothing to elevators.