Sound Affects: environments, brain work, and the backgroundification of nature

• In Event: Sound, Labor and Environmental History

Abstract

In the US by the late 1960s, background music was employed in public spaces, work spaces, and private homes. It was used by individuals on themselves, managers on workers, marketers on consumers to alter listeners’ mood, mind, and bodies. The environments series of sound recordings by Irving Teibel, debuting in 1969 with “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore,” marked an expansion in the types of sounds heard, their effects, their affects, and their applications. Teibel, using new sound editing techniques enabled by access to an IBM 360, “improved” nature sounds to better facilitate concentration, relaxation, sex, and more. This paper will, through a close analysis of the consumer surveys, listening tests, correspondence, marketing materials, and internal memos of Syntonic Research Inc, Teibel’s company, examine the origins of the systematic use of nature sounds in built spaces to improve focus. These heavily mediated nature sounds were used to muffle and replace the sounds (and silences) of the built environment. I argue that, among several unintended consequences of putting nature sounds to work, perhaps the most consequential for how the public understood and experienced their world in the last decades of the twentieth century was the further backgroundification of the non-built environment.

Author

• Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State University