Writing the History of Music Designed to be Ignored: Sound Affects from Edison to Spotify

• In Event: At the Crossroads of the History of Music and History of Science

English Abstract

In this paper, I trace out the history of the science of background music, designed to be applied to listeners’ bodies and mind often at or just below the threshold of attention. Using examples from music in industry, Muzak in public spaces, and ambient music and nature records of the 1970s, I document the mechanisms through which sound engineers shaped and standardized listener experiences. Much of the efficacy of this music as applied science depended on listeners’ inattention to it. Considering sound and music as applied science, in turn, allows us to treat them as world-making technologies. And yet, despite the ubiquity of these sounds, the experience of them is tricky to find in the archives. Where can we find affective experiences in the archival record, especially those prompted by technologies/phenomena created to obscure themselves? How might we “sense against the archive”? Because the subjects of these sound applications were also consumers actively marketed to, subject-object, scientist-public binaries break down. More generally, examining the liminal soundscapes of background music motivates us to think carefully about whose attention we attend to — the scientists or the subjects of their science — and how not just epistemological frameworks but phenomenological ones are formed.

Author

• Alexandra Hui, University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès