Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 15, 1994 TAG: 9412150015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Over the years ``Muzak'' has become for most people a generic word for the bland, reprocessed, instrumental music that you barely register as you are shopping at Wal-Mart for multipacks of Jockey briefs. The word Muzak is such a joke that the Muzak company considered changing names in 1987. But they didn't. Maybe because they have, as of last count, 200,000 customers and about 80 million listeners a day.
Isn't there a paradox here? It's easily solved. Muzak's customers are businesses, not music buffs. The music is not there to be listened to; it exists to alter your behavior.
In fact the whole idea of environmental music is that you don't really hear it. You are enveloped by it, the way the Blob enveloped its victims. Muzak is simply part of the late-20th century environment, like chlorofluorocarbons.
Elevator music was invented many moons ago when elevators were new contraptions, not much more than cages. They rattled you. The music was designed to be soothing, so you wouldn't focus so much on whether the elevator cable would break.
The Muzak company, founded in 1934, now has 12 different channels, but the most popular is still the environmental music channel, ``today's instrumental favorites, hits and standards tastefully arranged and recorded especially for Muzak and programmed in Muzak's proprietary Stimulus Progression format,'' according to a Muzak brochure.
Stimulus Progression allegedly increases worker efficiency. The hour is divided into 15-minute segments, increasingly uptempo, so that over the course of the hour you are whipped into a high-energy ``Feelings''-hummin' monster of productivity. Muzak also tries to counteract the fatigue that workers feel in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. When you're down, Muzak's up!
Does it really work? Muzak has reams of studies showing it does. And there's no reason why it shouldn't. Nor is Muzak the only way to stimulate workers. Bright lights help, and even some kind of white noise is better than silence. (The Why bunker uses a tape loop of a gurgling coffee percolator.)
Now here's the big news: Muzak is getting funkier. Steve Ward, Muzak's manager of broadcast programming, says the Baby Boomers want a different sort of aural wallpaper than did a previous generation. ``We've tried to make that channel more hip and more '90s, and we've changed the types of songs that we're selecting.''
Voices are, of course, deleted still, since voices are too much in the foreground, too distracting. But now the occasional guitar lick can stay. The new rules, says Ward, may allow even ``a mellow Led Zeppelin tune.''
So get ready. Any day now you may hear the Muzak version of ``Stairway to Heaven.'' Just think of it as ``Elevator to Heaven.''
The Mailbag:
It's an all-elevator column today because Rich F. of Arlington, Va., asks, ``If an individual in a falling elevator jumps at the precise time the elevator is about to hit bottom, will the individual save himself from injury?''
Dear Rich: It was thinking about elevators that helped Einstein develop his theories of relativity. Which is a nice way of saying that your question isn't quite as silly as it sounds.
Einstein imagined an elevator somewhere out in space, in zero gravity. It would be accelerating in the direction of the ceiling (up) at 32 feet per second, that is, g, the rate of acceleration of an object falling toward the Earth due to gravity. He asked: If you were inside this elevator, and there were no windows, could you tell that it was out in space? Or would you think you were standing in a normal elevator on Earth, and that heaviness you felt was just the planet's gravity? If you had enough scientific instruments, could you detect the difference between gravity and acceleration?
He concluded that there isn't any difference. Gravity is acceleration. That's his equivalence principle.
As for jumping: It won't work. One of our favorite physics 'sperts, Robert Park of the University of Maryland (eventually we will have to start paying him) worked out the equations.
Startling conclusion: If the elevator is free-falling toward the bottom of the elevator shaft you can't jump at all. You have to have weight to jump, and in a falling elevator you're weightless. ``You can't jump. You're floating,'' Park says. Normally, when you bend your knees to get ready to jump, your body drops. But in free fall, if you bend your knees your feet will simply come up off the floor.
But let's say the elevator falls so far that, due to air resistence, it reaches terminal velocity. You will stop floating and resume standing normally. You can jump. But the amount of velocity you can generate by jumping is tiny compared to the velocity of the falling elevator. ``You're still going to be mush and the top of the elevator's going to hit you. Terminal has another meaning here,'' Park says.
As an added problem, when you jump, you push down on the floor of the elevator and make it fall slightly faster (you increase its terminal velocity). So the top of the elevator is going to come at you a little harder. Moreover, you are putting energy into the whole system of the elevator. That energy has to be dissipated upon impact. Park says the overall ``mess'' of the crash will increase if you jump.
So think about the clean-up crews. Just stand there and take it.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB