After 60 Years In The Elevator, Muzak Is Breaking Out All Over

In Florida, it was used as a form of punishment for a guy who blared a “Jamaican Jam” tape in the wee hours of the morning. A character in the comic strip “Doonesbury” devised a plan to use it to drive drug dealers off a street corner.

It’s Muzak, or elevator music, and everybody’s celebrating its recent 60th anniversary.

OK, so not everybody’s celebrating its creation, and the hills aren’t exactly alive with the sound of Muzak.

Muzak is mostly associated with elevators, and in one episode of “Saturday Night Live,” eternal hell for Paul Simon.

For many people, Muzak conjures up images of popular tunes they grew up with that were somehow filtered through a machine that stripped them of lyrics. A variety of dentist offices, fast-food restaurants and other businesses subscribe to the piped-in Muzak delivered via satellite.

The satellite channel that hosts the instrumental interpretations of popular songs is called the environmental channel, said Bruce Funkhouser, Muzak’s vice president of programming and licensing.

Muzak gets permission from songwriters to reproduce songs for subscribing businesses, Funkhouser said. Musicians enter a studio, record the music and replace a melody carried by a voice with a prominent instrument, such as a saxophone or a piano.

The company is based in Seattle, also home to the grunge phenomenon that really hasn’t made its way to the Muzak scene.

“I don’t think we’ve done a Nirvana tune yet,” Funkhouser said. “The crucial test I guess is melody and if the tune is memorable.

“In a lot of cases like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and people out of the hiphop, rap and heavy metal areas, most of that is interpretation of the singer,” he continued. “If you do take that actual voice away, even if you replace it with a saxophone or a piano, it’s still not the vocalist’s interpretation. The song becomes unfamiliar.”

But that hasn’t stopped Muzak from recording Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk On The Ocean” or Boyz II Men’s “End Of The Road.” Even James Brown, the Indigo Girls and Chaka Khan have made their way to Muzak charts.

“If we choose a tune to go on the environmental channel that can mean thousands of dollars for those songwriters each year and that adds up,” Funkhouser said.

More than 80 million people are served by Muzak daily, including customers at some McDonald’s restaurants, according to Muzak statistics.

Don’t tell anyone, but a few submarine bases also use Muzak for sound masking. “They use it because it cuts down on conversations and kind of helps maintain secrecy,” Funkhouser said.

In one edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary, Muzak is defined as pervasive, bland and monotonous. But that is a reputation Muzak acquired from the past, Funkhouser said. Muzak now is new and improved.

“The one thing that Muzak does is it creates a certain atmosphere and it blocks out a lot of other noise sounds in stores and retail shops and lobbies,” Funkhouser said.