On background music, suicide with a spoon and a 7 day challenge

by Minim Pro
I'm about to lose it in a coffee shop. The CD they're playing began sticking a good 30 seconds ago. I look around. The place is about half full but nobody else seems to be irritated by the noise. A woman reads a book on the next table, couples and groups of friends sip from cups the size of soup bowls and chat away, seemingly impervious to the fact that Norah Jones has developed a chronic stutter.

There are no customers at the counter, two staff members feign wiping surfaces while discussing their plans for the weekend. I look down at the long-handled spoon in front of me and wonder if it's possible to disembowel yourself with such a blunt instrument. Over the speakers, Norah goes 'D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-' in a endless loop, each skip now thudding into my skull like a pneumatic drill.

Deciding that a misfiring Norah Jones album really isn't worth dying over (might have been a different story if it was Sarah Vaughan), I walk over to the counter where one of the staff looks at me and raises their eyebrows by way of a greeting.

"The CD is skipping" I say.

"The what?" she says.

"The CD" I insist "it's stuck, it has been for a while. Would you mind changing it, it's a bit annoying." I hate myself for making it sound like an apology, like it's something fundamentally flawed in me as a person that has led me to have to request this.

She stares at me blankly for a moment as the words register, she finally opens her ears and the penny drops.
"Oh right." she says "Sorry, I didn't notice" and scuttles through a swing door behind the counter. A few seconds later, the gratuitous aural assault is over and I find myself in a situation I never expected to be in: I'm actually glad to hear Jamie Cullum.

I turn around to accept the adoration from my fellow customers. I don't expect to be mobbed and showered with garlands for my act of deliverance, but I am astonished that I don't even get a nods or smiles - or at least the odd conspiratorial grimace that says 'that was terrible and I too was in pain. We will always have a bond of shared suffering.'

Nobody even looks up. It's almost as if they didn't even notice.

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We live in a world that teaches people to ignore music. The pervasiveness of 'background music' is eroding the ability to listen to and appreciate music.

Walk into any shop on the High St, any cafe or restaurant and they'll be playing music. Walk into any office, factory or warehouse and there's a good chance there'll be a radio belching out sound all day. Walk through any city and every other person under the age of 30 will have headphones on as they shop and read bus timetables.

I was in a bar the other day and when I went to the toilet, they were piping music in there as well. This is pretty common these days, but what astonished me was that it was different music from that being playing in the bar. Whose idea was that? Was this a carefully selected playlist lovingly compiled to complement and ease the functioning of my urinary tract?

It always fascinates that it ever occurred to anyone to put speakers in a lavatory, but it fascinates me even more to think that an establishment would invest in a separate music system solely to provide the soundtrack to the toilet experience.

When I walk through the city centre at the weekend, it's not uncommon to see trendy boutiques position speakers outside the front door and just blast music into the street - presumably to try and attract customers. I'm never sure how this is supposed to work. I've never seen anybody stop dead in their tracks and say 'Hey, they're playing Dizzee Rascal in that shop so I'm going to go and impulse by some jeans and glittery sandals'.

We've got to stop using music randomly to pollute every public space and every occasion because it's teaching people to stop listening. As a society, we are educating the population to tune out music and accept it as ubiquitous but largely valueless.

We are teaching people that music is not to be listened to, concentrated on and appreciated, but it simply a noise to be talked over, an antidote to quiet, something to create 'atmosphere' (whatever the hell that means). Silence seems to have become one of the great taboos of the modern world.

If music is everywhere, constantly and indiscriminately, it's hardly surprising that it starts to lose it's value. In the nineteenth century, salon parties were held where the highlight of the evening would be a performance given by the likes of Chopin and Liszt and they would hold a fascinated audience spellbound with their compositions and improvisations.

I can't really see that happening today. At an equivalent modern social event, they'd be stuck in a corner and largely ignored until somebody drunk decided they want to hear 'Piano Man' or have a singalong. Progress in action I suppose.

There's not much we can do as individuals to stop this deplorable modern trend, but we can try and take responsibility for our own listening. I'm going to be conducting a little experiment this week dear reader, and it'd be great if you would join me.

The challenge is this: for the next seven days, try not to listen to any music unless you can give it your full attention. Of course, you can't do anything about the background music everywhere you go, but you can make sure that you don't put any music on unless you're in a position where you can listen to it without distraction.

So that means no iPod when you're wandering around the supermarket, no music on in the house while you're washing dishes or cleaning the bathroom or getting ready to go out and definitely no music if there's any kind of conversation likely to happen.

In other words, we're going to try and spend a week where we make our experience of music as conscious as possible. So, on that note, I'm off to listen to something cool and if you choose to join me in my experiment, it'd be great to hear how you're getting on in the comments below.

Until next time...

From: http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/11/01/on-background-music-suicide-with-a-spoon-and-a-7-day-challenge-9871138/