Ivan Krajbich, a renowned pediatric surgeon in Seattle, specializes in operations requiring seven or eight hours of laser-like concentration on tiny organs and thread-like nerves. During these exacting procedures, Dr. Krajbich insists that loud rock music be played in the operating room. The rest of the team finds the level painfully disturbing, but he claims he absolutely needs the music blasting away to keep him focused on his work. Unfortunately, the operating staff cannot block out those painful sounds, pounding in the background. Humans can close their eyes; they cannot close their ears.
We don’t listen to background sounds, though we do hear them. Listening requires attention, and background sounds require no attention. But we are aware of them. Our brain registers their presence. Unfortunately, the music in the operating room was so persistently annoying that the team was forced to pay attention to it. At that moment it ceased to be background music, and must surely have distracted them from their duties. Perhaps the Hippocratic oath could be expanded to include “do no harm” to staff as well as to patients.
Are all the sounds in the environment processed simultaneously in different locations of the brain, or does the brain shift attention in a nanosecond from one source to another, creating the impression that it receives more than one sound at the same time? That is the subject for the next, more technical blog. Whatever the differing opinions of neuroscientists on this subject, I imagine we can already agree that the brain’s ability to organize so many aural events in our acoustical environment is a spectacular achievement.
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The use of music as background accompaniment has a long history. As early as the tenth century, groups of wandering students—the jongleurs and goliards—performed secular songs at weddings and other court celebrations while the jolly party-goers talked and laughed as they ate and drank. By the seventeenth century, composers were often commissioned to provide music as background for social occasions. Mozart made an instrumental version of his own aria from “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Non piu Andrai,” and he plays it as background entertainment during Don Giovanni’s last supper.
In twentieth-century America, selling music for background use became big business. By the 1930s, the Muzak corporation had installed recorded music in offices, in stores, and in the elevators we cannot escape, and soon the company developed packaged fifteen-minute segments to stimulate worker productivity in factories. The idea of background music so enchanted President Eisenhower that in 1952 he ordered that music be piped into the entire West Wing of the White House. I imagine that a high-ranking staff member who was trusted with programming the selections had to be given top security clearance before checking the sound quality in the Situation Room, and perhaps even in the executive bathrooms.
Today we can still find background music in our work places and in our bars and restaurants. On Seventh Avenue near 20th Street, there is a bar that plays loud music programmed by the management. Everyone who wants to have a conversation must yell to be heard. There is also a juke box which plays pop hits for a quarter. Customers sitting at the bar play them right along with the house music. From the restaurant tables in the back, you hear the house programmed background music, the people up front shouting at each other, and their favorite pop tunes on the juke box, all piled on top of each other. When I asked a few diners if the loud noises didn’t bother them, one said he really liked it, another, that she paid no attention. A guy over in a corner was reading a book. He said he was studying for an exam, and the music and the noise helped him concentrate. I left.
Out on the sidewalk there were people coming and going, almost all of them listening to music on portable devices – I could identify Brahms, Ice T, and Lady Gaga, leaking through various headphones.
On August 1, 1981, a television music channel was opened by a corporation called Music Television, or MTV. It developed a new format: major vocal stars in elaborately produced videos, featuring a singer or a group performing against lavish, fast-cutting backgrounds. The young audience that already worshipped these stars was dazzled by the pace.
Producers of television commercials, in order to capture the growing MTV audience, began adapting the quick-cut technique of the music videos to their advertisements. The competitive demand for attention led to ever-faster shifts from one scene to the next. Since commercials had only a minute or two to make their pitch, the producers built visual excitement by making the background pictures shorter and shorter, with more and more uneven cutting from scene to scene. Viewers, working hard to find a story line, soon realized there was none – only a variety of fast-moving pictures that often had no logical connection. The quick changes functioned as the selling pitch of the commercial – not the singers or the flashy music. The allure of the product lay not in the narrative skill of the video, or the star quality of the performers, but in the rat-a-tat rhythm of the picture cutting. The advertisers celebrated as sales of their products soared.
Imagine what a school music teacher faces today with a classroom of young students fluent in TV - and in all the other “social media.” As their pocket wizards offer greater and greater speed of communication, they move easily from one abbreviated message to another. When I asked a young woman in her twenties how many people read her texts or her Tweets, or her Facebook messages every day, she said over seven hundred. I wonder how many of those ever become face-to-face friends, as they move in this jumpy existence from one brief personal contact to another, where learning to slow down and listen attentively is bombarded with so much distraction.
And there will not be much help from home. The parents, who grew up in the developing days of MTV and its followers, were often without music training during their own childhood, which means that today, among many of them, there is no interest in classical music, and you will not likely find a piano or other musical instrument in their homes, except maybe the occasional guitar or a drum set. Based on their own limited backgrounds, mom and dad may even have voted against a school budget request that provided for a classroom music teacher. It’s just not a priority for them.
In televising the Tennis Championships in New York in September, 2020, the producers could not decide which of two important matches to offer as each was approaching a climactic moment. So they showed both at the same time, splitting the television screen. They also allowed the commentator of one of the matches to continue his analysis; PLUS, they played music to ramp up the excitement. One could not watch both halves of the screen at the same time; but if one wanted, one could move back and forth from one to the other. At any one time the brain was required to accommodate three of the four sources – one of the matches, the commentator, and the background music.
Since the arrival of cell phones with their high-tech earphones it has become easier to be distracted, to adhere almost to a second reality. The minute one exits the subway stairs, out onto the streets, or sits down at a restaurant, or leaves the office building and settles into a taxi, out comes the phone, and we ignore a companion, our children in the stroller, dangerous traffic at the street corner - even walking arm in arm with our lover, we are pulled by that other world in our ears.
What music has to say to us – all kinds of music – can be profoundly affecting. Playing it in the background while focusing on some other activity, not only cheats the music of its most powerful expression; it fosters a habit of partial concentration that weakens later attempts at purposeful listening.
It deprives us of the best that music has to offer.