ARCHITECTURE SOUNDTRACK

Abstract

This paper hopes to pursue the question regarding the relationship between architecture and music. Through the notion of elevator music which is famously known as background music, this dissertation hopes to point out that the influence of music within architectural spaces has already existed around us in ubiquitous manner.

A company known as Muzak has claimed to provide ‘audio architecture’ for its clients. At first glance, one may be fooled by the grandiose image of architecture that they might want to project, a whole building which is connected by bridges of music, to their clients. However, the company’s claim is more of- audio architecture as ‘the integration of music, voice, and sound to create experiences designed specifically for your business ’ . In short, audio architecture is about making people comfortable buying things from particular companies.

Muzak mainly provides background music which provides the right ambience for a lot of spaces namely elevators, toilets and commercial stores such as Starbucks. Background music serves as a hidden tool of power that infiltrates our daily lives quietly. It also becomes a tool of strategic consumption, an essential mode of sociality for all of us who conform to the norm. This conformity becomes the pleasure of belonging that takes root in the comfort of repetition.

The form evolution of background music from Muzak’s stimulus progression towards iTunes, as well elevator as an ubiquitous architectural space will be explored further to show a decreasing author visibility by one in power, extending the understanding on how both are able to implant their ideology within us tacitly through the idea of customization.

ITunes and the latest elevator development as highly sophisticated network systems have further brought up possibility that our desire and identity is possibly existed within the network of system instead of our own body. It gradually restructures our personal information that we have inputted and use it to affect our thinking and habits in devious manner. In this moment our identity is possibly controlled and given to us by a highly sophisticated information network as we have become a pseudo-self, a copy of what is supposedly real in the realm of system.