Word: muzakal
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When, years hence, your B.A. admits you to the company of educated men, you will be able to face the Muzak with a just pride in how little you know and how well you can talk about...
...Dance. Very early in its 29 years of programming music. Muzak learned to its great delight that the same music has the same wonderful effect on everybody. With this in mind, Muzak gets by with just three standard programs-Office, Factory, and Public Area Muzak. Office and Factory Muzak, each specially programmed, are piped to customers on alternate quarter hours around the clock. Public Area Muzak-a simple combination of the other two-plays constantly. Thus diners have their appetites involuntarily improved by the same tunes that increase the efficiency of riveters; ladies listening to Muzak through earphones placed...
...Muzak keeps an ear cocked for any music that might cause emotional outbursts in its audience. Deep in the Heart of Texas causes workers to clap their hands, forgetting their tasks, and rock 'n' roll makes waitresses put down the soup and dance. Muzak's special service for jet airplanes has discreetly abandoned playing I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling. At last they achieve their artistic ambition: music to be utterly ignored...
Pallid Pap. Lately, Muzak's message has begun to drift around the world, always with the same serene results it has accomplished in America. Women workers in an Argentine flour mill who used to fight and scream at each other on sight, now go to work peaceably to music's soft accompaniment. Passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad suffer the trip to the tune of Cossack songs and band music, and a brothel in Stuttgart has applied for the "Light Industrial" program local Muzak men offer...
Bland as it is though, piped-in music has a way of inflaming people-especially people whose feelings for music force them really to listen. "It's so faint it sounds like angels singing-and that's hell to work with," says an unhappy listener at the Muzakized Ford plant in Dearborn. "It is pallid pap that will cause all our musical teeth to fall out," says Helmut Blume, acting dean of music at Montreal's McGill University. But in all their countless installations, background music hustlers claim to get complaints only from old men in green...