Elevator music
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to "brighten" the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." --Liner notes of Brian Eno's 1978 release Ambient 1: Music for Airports |
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Elevator music (also known as Muzak, piped music, or lift music) is a name given to a type of instrumental music, that is commonly played through speakers in elevators, shopping malls, grocery stores, department stores, telephone systems (while the caller is on hold), cruise ships, airliners (during flight after taking off), hotels, airports, business offices, restaurants, bars, hospitals, as well as electronic program guides, weather forecasts, television testcards, and some arcade game venues. The term is also frequently applied as a generic term for any form of easy listening, piano solo, bossa nova, smooth jazz, jazz standard or middle of the road music, or to the type of recordings commonly heard on "beautiful music" radio stations.
This style of music is sometimes used to comedic effect in mass media such as film, where intense or dramatic scenes may be interrupted or interspersed with such anodyne music while characters use an elevator (e.g. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, The Blues Brothers, Dawn of the Dead, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Spider-Man 2, and Night at the Museum). Some video games have used elevator music for comedic effect, e.g. Metal Gear Solid 4 where a few elevator music-themed tracks are accessible on the in-game iPod, as well as Rise of the Triad: Dark War, which occasionally plays elevator music when in elevators during stages.
Muzak was a major supplier of business background music, and was the best known such supplier for years. Ironically, while its name is commonly associated with elevator music in the public mind, that was never one of the company's offerings. Since 1997, Muzak has used original artists for its music source, except on the Environmental channel.
See also
- Background music
- Beautiful music
- Furniture music
- "The Girl from Ipanema", song frequently used as elevator music in media
- Light music
- Lounge music
- Roland Sound Canvas, one of the iconic MIDI synthesizer modules used to generate instrumental elevator music tracks.
- Seeburg 1000, a background music system
- 3M Cantata 700, a popular BGM system boasting the largest mass marketed tape cassette ever produced with each tape holding 700 tracks totalling about 30 hours of music.
- Space music
- Vaporwave
