Working Sounds
by Steve
I’m not sure how I feel about noise in a working environment. This morning, for instance, I have been disrupted and distracted by a colleague playing Michael Bublé’s Christmas hits at high volume, another colleague’s mobile phone squawking out a rather tinny rendition of something by Led Zeppelin, the constant chug of the photocopier, the initial sniffs of someone’s winter cold, plus your usual conversational hubbub/general non-specific office noise. I’m grateful that there haven’t been any especially loud phone calls, nor the bizarre, inexplicable exclamations to nobody in particular that sometimes emanate from certain staff.
Yet, this might all be excuses on my part for not being as productive as I’d like, or at least, as productive as perhaps I should be. Now, as I type this, the office has quietened down somewhat, and that quiet can be almost oppressive. A little background noise can be comforting, or at least blocks out those voices asking Why do we have to bother working today anyway?
I’m sure some gentle background music can help productive working, at least as a form of more tuneful white noise to block out the real world just enough to allow you to enter some sort of thinking space.
In terms of office noise, we live in an age of earphones, and quality broadband to stream all sorts of good stuff into those earphones, which can then block out all but the most annoying sounds. This certainly helps when undertaking more menial tasks, but I’m not sure it is that helpful when I have to properly engage the ol’ grey matter. Not that it stops me. We live in a multi-tasking age, and if that means doing two things badly (in this case listening and working), then so be it.
Anyway, this is really just an excuse to post something from a past age. The Atlantic has flagged up this great piece of music posted on the fine Ubuweb site. It is a symphony of mechanical noise, made in the 1960s from the standard office equipment of the time. I didn’t appreciate how noisy offices must have been in a world of typewriters, calculator machines and the like. Bublé, mobile ringtones and modern photocopiers have got nothing on this.
Disclaimer: I do actually have a soft spot for the smooth musical stylings of Mr Bublé, and I love Christmas music more than is strictly socially acceptable, I’m just not entirely convinced a working office at 9am on a wet November morning is the right time or place for it.
Wait until next year 
Nicely written post! I brought a very large set of headphones into work. When I have something that requires a lot of attention, I keep them plugged in but without music. It keeps all but the emotionally neediest coworkers from interrupting my work.
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I have never forgotten this:
What’s on right now? I don’t mean the radio. I mean, is your air conditioning on? Is your car engine idling? Is your refrigerator running? Just take a moment and listen. Listen to the droning around you. Map the landscape of your background noise. See if you can hear what Toby Lester heard one day a few years ago. I’ll wait.
Toby Lester
I arrived in a new job at a new office. And in those sorts of situations, you’re always kind of hyper-aware of everything. And it was quite a cold week, and the heater was just humming along very loudly to the point of distraction. And I started paying attention to it. And it was a very musical hum, and I found myself humming in the key that the heater was playing, essentially.
Jack Hitt
Once he heard his heater, then Toby was in the unenviable position of not being able to not hear his heater. You too will have this problem shortly. But Tobey, who’s an editor at the Atlantic Monthly, is a musical guy who hums at work. So he began to play with it, literally harmonizing with the heater, creating interesting intervals and chords, a kind of barely audible musical score to his life in the office.
Toby Lester
And then I started to work myself back and realized that I had probably been singing in the key of my office as long as I had inhabited an office.
Jack Hitt
Was it a good one for you? Your high notes weren’t too high?
Toby Lester
No, it suited me pretty well, actually. I was able to appropriately reproduce whatever mood I happened to be in. But that’s when I started wondering whether it actually wasn’t working the other way around. Rather than my knowing this note was there and playing a minor third or a major third, whether, in fact, there was something else playing a note on top of the heater that would, in effect, create my mood for me.I found myself sitting in this little office listening to the heater and staring at my computer and suddenly realizing that yes, in fact, the computer was humming as well. Not nearly as strongly, but it was indeed humming. And that brought me to bring a little pitch pipe into the office and figure out what the two notes were.And at the same time, for some reason, I’d been thinking about why is that we seem almost universally to assume that a minor chord is sad and a major chord is happy. If a minor third just is somehow inherently sad, then if I were sitting in an office having a minor third played at me all day long, then it’s indeed possible that I could be made sad by just sitting in my office, which, of course, everybody is.
Jack Hitt
You’re saying that the heating system in your office and the computer hum of your machine created a certain interval.
Toby Lester
Right.
Jack Hitt
Right. So can you show us on the keyboard what was the basis of that interval?
Toby Lester
It was essentially– [PLAYS KEYBOARD]
Jack Hitt
So the first note, this one– [PLAYS KEYBOARD] –that was like the heating system. And then your computer was doing this. [PLAYS KEYBOARD]
Toby Lester
Yep.
Jack Hitt
So together, what you’re saying is that the interval it created was this. [PLAYS KEYBOARD]
Toby Lester
Right. And that happens to be a major third, which happens to be what’s traditionally interpreted as happy.
Jack Hitt
So you’re loving your new job, then.
Toby Lester
Well, except for the fact that I was spending a good deal of time on the phone. And the dial tone played a note above that, which was then constructing a three-note chord. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] That was the heater, that was the computer, and then that nasty little one was the telephone.
Jack Hitt
So all together, they were– [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Ooh.When played against the tonic– or foundation note– of his heater, the telephone created an interval known as an augmented fourth. Toby began to do some research and discovered that the Catholic Church had assigned different meanings to numerous musical intervals back in the Middle Ages. And the augmented fourth was the most reviled sound of its time– feared as the “diabolus in musica,” the devil in the music.Toby and I were sitting in his kitchen when I was talking to him. And suddenly I was afflicted with the same keenness of hearing that Toby had been. I heard something, and felt compelled to identify it.
Jack Hitt
What is that, now that we’re sitting here?
Toby Lester
That is the tonic of the kitchen, the refrigerator humming.
Jack Hitt
Let’s see if we can get that. Where’s the motor? Oh yeah, here. Down here. [PLAYS KEYBOARD]
Toby Lester
That’s the note.
Jack Hitt
So what note is that?
Toby Lester
B-flat.
Jack Hitt
So that’s the tonic of your kitchen?
Toby Lester
Essentially.
Jack Hitt
Not long ago, Toby had come across a critic named Deryck Cooke, who had written a book updating the church’s musical classifications. Rather than finding the devil in the music, Cooke assigned quite modern interpretations to each sound. One interval, for example, seemed to inspire, quote, “a spirit of anguish.” Another sound was “violent longing in a context of finality.” Apparently, any combination of notes conjured its own specific mood and sensation.
Jack Hitt
For example, let’s just do one. This refrigerator’s in B-flat. So when you come in in the morning and you put a bagel in your microwave over here, what note are we adding to the tonic here?
Toby Lester
Let’s listen to the microwave. Even the beeping–
Jack Hitt
What was that beep, do you think?
Toby Lester
Let’s press it again and see. A C.
Jack Hitt
Right. So it’s a B-flat to a C just to turn on the microwave.
Toby Lester
Well, and let’s look at that. Let’s examine that. A B-flat to a C is a major second. And Mr. Cooke refers to it as “pleasurably longing and has a context of finality.”
Jack Hitt
So play that on the keyboard here. Let’s hear it.
Toby Lester
[PLAYS KEYBOARD]
Jack Hitt
OK, yeah, finality. There’s a sort of closure to that. And so then the bagel is ready. So let’s run that microwave.
Toby Lester
[STARTS MICROWAVE] And that hum is an F-sharp, very identifiably. So the B-flat and F-sharp. [PLAYS KEYBOARD] Not a great way to start the day, really. And let’s see, what would that be? “Active anguish in the context of flux,” according to Mr. Cook.[LAUGHTER]
Jack Hitt
Active anguish in a context of flux. Did Sartre write this? [LAUGHS]Toby’s research led him to Plato, who once wrote, “When the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change.” It sounds preposterous at first, but might there be a connection between the low, constant humming of our industrial culture and the dissonant mood of anxiety and irresolution that seems to characterize our century?
Toby Lester
We’re the first generation of people to live in an environment in which there are lots of devices buzzing, whirring, humming at us. I’m entirely a product of it. I have no awareness of a life led without some sort of humming appliance lurking somewhere behind me.
Jack Hitt
Of course, there must’ve been noises in the 16th century that were musical. If nothing else, just nature.
Toby Lester
But what appliances do that I don’t think other natural world things have done is provide a steady drone. It’s the droning that is really novel. My guess is that people these days find themselves a lot more bored, in general, than they used to be, partly because their appliances are taking care of things for them. But the payoff is that there’s this drone behind everything. And the drone is sort of a symptom of modern life. We’re very acutely aware of our own boredom, and we’ve been eased into our boredom by all these machines.
Jack Hitt
So let me restate my first question. Listening to your own background noise, do you hear what Toby Lester hears? Try it again.Now that I can’t stop hearing it, I wonder if every exercise in mapping is really such a good thing. When I sat at my keyboard composing these lines, the computer hum and fan were droning a minor third at me, an interval associated with sorrow. Before Columbus’s day, the old maps simply showed an arrow pointing to the mysterious West, and then the words, “there dragons be.” Maybe not every terra incognita needs discovering.But, of course, this is America. We don’t just explore, we profit. Any day now, I expect a house tuner to be ringing my doorbell, some failed telemarketer who’ll promise to harmonize the whir of my toaster with the flush of the toilet, and thereby guarantee me an inner peace worthy of the millennium.
Toby Lester
And you could obviously select from– like you might select from paint chips– from a variety of different house moods, happy, sad, active anguish in a context of flux.[LAUGHTER]
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Thanks for the read, Diana. And thanks for popping along! And apologies for me taking two days to reply.
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It’s great to read something that’s both enjoyable and provides pragmatisdc solutions.
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