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Paper short abstract:

Through an examination of nature sound records released between 1969 and 1989 for private and public spaces, this paper will show how background music was naturalized and then, in turn, the environment was pushed to the background, background-i-fied.

Paper long abstract:

With the introduction of car radio, telephone hold music, music on trains and planes, music while you sleep, music in death (at funeral homes), background music was an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the American soundscape. As auditory technologies and practices for engaging with them co-developed, background music was naturalized. That is, the public began to expect continuous, recorded, functional music, not just in public spaces but private spaces and moments as well. In 1969, the polymath Irving Teibel released “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore” of recorded and edited ocean sounds, launching the nature sound records craze. The environments series produced by Teibel’s Syntonic Research Inc. marked an expansion in the types of sounds heard, their effects, their affects, and their applications. Like background music, the nature sounds produced by SRI and similar recording companies, were was also, by the 1970s, increasingly coating private settings. Through a close examination of the environments record series released by Irving Teibel between 1969 and 1979, I show how these engineered, improved sounds of nature repackaged natural sounds for consumption. This consumption practice reached its apex with The Nature Company stores, fixtures of suburban mid-tier indoor malls of the 1980s and 90s. Not only could music be functionally applied to improve the environment, nature itself could (be applied to the environment) as well. One consequence, I argue, as the sensory-perceptual feedback loop of functional sound was complete, stable and standardized, natural sounds — and nature itself — were pushed to the background.