Modern-Day Muzak Features `Foreground' Tunes -- Seattle's Leading In Musical Exports Of All Kinds

SEATTLE - Musical fads such as disco and grunge emerge with an expiration date. Muzak, like Beethoven and Mozart, is forever.

Or so it seems.

Before Nirvana and Pearl Jam put Seattle on the musical map, background music was the city's leading musical export.

For decades, shopping malls, offices, grocery stores, restaurants and dentist's offices around the globe have lulled listeners with deceptively soothing sounds meant to cause lucrative changes in human behavior.

Modern-day Muzak isn't just popular songs sanitized to be inoffensive to everyone - with the exception of music critics and people with taste.

More than just background music

Muzak is also "foreground" music, contemporary songs as originally recorded, business messaging services, in-store advertising and video programming.

"I guess the biggest misconception is that people don't know we do anything but background music," said Leslie Ritter, Muzak's director of marketing. "Our name is practically a household word."

"Everybody knows the name Muzak but most people equate it with bad-caliber background music," Ritter said. "Our background music is so much better than that to begin with. Secondly, that isn't all we do."

Most of Muzak's 200,000 subscribers worldwide receive the musical services via satellite.

They are charged an installation fee that ranges from $200 to $500 and a monthly fee of $45 to $75 per channel, 12 of which are currently available, ranging from background music and adult contemporary to Latin.

Recordings poke fun at Muzak

Being an institution has its price.

An album called "Grunge Lite" is the latest in a long line of recordings that poke fun at background music.

In 1987, Devo put out its "E-Z Listening Disc."

Ted Nugent once offered to buy Muzak for $10 million to put it out of business.

"It wasn't for sale for $10 million, believe me," said Elfie Mehan, a producer and member of Muzak's music-selection committee who's been with the company 20 years. "I think that if he had looked into the company, he would really be surprised."

Sara DeBell, Seattle musician and producer, put together Grunge Lite featuring elevatorized versions of Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and Nirvana's `Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Soon after she'd finished recording the album, DeBell offered the cuts to Muzak.

"They told me: `We never did this kind of thing. It's much too square. We like to have a sense of fun in our music.' I thought that was kind of funny."

One reviewer has described the album as repulsive.

"I took that as a compliment," DeBell said.

Mehan is unfazed by the parodies.

As part of the selection committee, she listens to hundreds of songs each month in order to put together various services.

Several recording studios used

Environmental music is recorded at several studios around the United States.

In the past year, the recording approach has shifted so that producers are attempting to keep Muzak recordings as faithful to the originals as possible while removing harsher aspects.

The repertoire consists of more than 5,000 titles with about 100 new songs recorded each month, Mehan said.

Recent additions to the collection include numbers by Tim Finn, Poco and The Pretenders.

"Right now we're doing some of the Who," Mehan said. "I have literally thousands of songs in my head all the time."

"Foreground music," available on some of the Muzak's channels, is aimed at a younger and hipper crowd, and includes original music by Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

Muzak has about 200,000 customers in the United States and abroad, officials said.

The company's history dates back to 1922, when retired Gen. George Squier patented a technique of transmitting music over power lines.

The patent was acquired by the North American Co., a public-utility holding company and named the resulting business Wired Radio Inc.

Phone lines used in '34

In 1934, NAC started bringing music into Cleveland homes over phone lines under the name Muzak.

In 1956, the company began transmitting music via subsidiary communications authorization - also known as radio sidebands or FM subcarriers.

Muzak began being carried via satellite in 1980. The company moved from New York City to Seattle in 1987.

Over the years, Muzak has conducted scores of studies on the effect music has on people.

Much of the research has focused on supermarkets.

"Studies show that if you play slower music, people shop at a more leisurely pace," Ritter said.

Muzak's "expressions" channel, a mixture of background music and original material, is aimed at a grocery stores' wide demographic, Ritter said.

Environmental music is based on the "Stimulus Progression" theory, which holds that music should be liveliest at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., when workers' productivity dips, thus stimulating listeners toward greater productivity.

The songs are assigned various codes that allow committee members to place them in a stimulating progression.

There's codes to describe a song's feeling, its tempo, whether it's old or new, Mehan said.

"Music has influence on people's feeling and it's a very positive influence," Mehan explained. "Say someone goes into a reception room, looking for a job, and is kind of scared. If you play some familiar music, it makes that whole reception room so much friendlier."