do any ilxor's do this for muzak? tell me about it!
"McKelvey, a creative manager at Muzak, is one of twenty-two “audio architects”—the company’s term for its program designers. All but two are in their twenties or thirties, and all have serious, eclectic, long-term relationships with music. (Eight of the architects work in the Circle, ten work in the Muzak office in Seattle, two work in New York, and two work from home, in Connecticut and in California.) McKelvey was born in 1980 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents weren’t musicians, but her mother liked to sing and her father worked as a d.j.; he now owns a night club in Charleston called Casablanca. McKelvey began playing the piano when she was two, could read notes on the treble clef before she could read words, and took up the violin when she was seven. Two years later, she joined the Charleston Youth Symphony, as a violinist, and performed through high school. At home, when she wasn’t practicing classical pieces, she listened mainly to eighties pop—Michael Jackson, DeBarge, the Jets—and to the music her parents loved, which was Motown and funk. “I never had a TV in my room,” she told me. “I always had a 45-player. My dad had an amazing record collection, and he still does, and it’s all first runs, not reissues. Whenever I’m in Charleston, I try to sneak records from him.” She says her current taste in music is too diverse to characterize."
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060410fa_fact
― lf (lfam), Sunday, 9 April 2006 20:25 (twenty years ago)
three months pass...
Nice article, although the very first sentence threw me off a little:
"If you blindfolded Dana McKelvey and led her into a retail store, a restaurant, a doctor’s office, or a bank, she could tell fairly quickly whether th music playing in the background was Muzak."
Does blindfolding a person really make it more difficult for them to distinguish between different types of music?
― Zachary Scott (Zach S), Monday, 7 August 2006 03:07 (nineteen years ago)
i think it's so cool that there are people who have constructed such intimate relationships between songs that they can get paid millions of dollars to create playlists for a specific space or experience.
― a name means a lot just by itself (lfam), Monday, 7 August 2006 03:49 (nineteen years ago)
I don't know, I think most of the time that I'm in one of the stores that pump out Muzak playlists, it's because I got tricked into shopping by my girlfriend or mom. So the soundtracks designed specifically for the typical Banana Republic shopper don't usually sound so good to me. Maybe next time I get dragged in I'll pay special attention to the subtle connections between the songs.
― Zachary Scott (Zach S), Monday, 7 August 2006 13:36 (nineteen years ago)
and don't act like you're too masculine to shop or too smart for muzak
― a name means a lot just by itself (lfam), Monday, 7 August 2006 14:29 (nineteen years ago)
i would think that blindfolding someone would make it EASIER to differentiate between styles of music.
my interest in muzak is for its bizarre, paleolithic radio network which beams the music into stores; it's like something out of "the crying of lot 49".
― Euai Kapaui (tracerhand), Monday, 7 August 2006 14:36 (nineteen years ago)