Word: muzakal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...total musication of America is by now almost complete. Muzak gets the credit for being the biggest noise maker of all, a feat that brings in $15,000,000 a year from its 30,000 subscribers. The soft comforting sounds that ooze from Muzak's speakers are heard each day by more than 60 million people-in hospitals and mortuaries, elevators and space capsules, prisons and jute mills. It even plays during all top secret conferences in the Pentagon, where its mission is to confound eavesdroppers by drowning out all the secret talk. If there is something faintly Chaplinesque...
...Sleep with It. Armed with telephone lines reaching out to its army of loudspeakers, Muzak plays its melodies from inside locked rooms. Once a day, the Muzak man enters to change the tapes, and it is a comfort to know that the machines are linked so that even in the event of total catastrophe, they could continue playing untended...
...Muzak programmers have studies that show precisely when workers get grumpy and lazy (10:30 in the morning, 3:30 in the afternoon), and they use their knowledge to plan programs of counteracting melodies, saving strong medicine such as Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo and Pass That Peace Pipe for the two big slumps. The tonic sometimes becomes addictive, as in the case of one Irving Wexler, who gets a thorough musication every day in his job as Miami's Muzak man. "I have Muzak in every room of my home," he says proudly. "Twenty-four hours a day. We sleep...
...Skeleton's Showing. To win such willing ears, Muzak keeps things simple and undemanding, guided always by its sole esthetic law: music must be unobtrusive. Ensuring that Muzak never intrudes, Program Director Donald M. O'Neill, the top banana of the piped-in music world, frowns on jazz, vocal music of any kind, classics, instrumental solos, everything set in minor keys (too sad), and anything else that lasts more than three minutes. O'Neill, his ten musicologists and his 35 arrangers, all work for a "functional sound" that fits into their "stimulus chart." Whenever they notice something...
...Muzak makes all its own recordings in an atmosphere of "the fullest artistic freedom," then turns the results over to engineers, who squeeze down the dynamic range to a maximum of 25 decibels (compared to 50 on normal LPs). The new tunes are spliced into the standard Muzak library of 7,000 selections, replacing old numbers that are constantly weeded out. This procedure, O'Neill says, has led Muzak to swing a little bit lately-if the Peg O'My Heart Cha Cha can be called swinging...