The French composer Erik Satie was known as a brilliant man with unusual habits and ideas. One of these was the concept of furniture music, which aimed to treat music like furniture in a room. This view meant that music could lack traditional form and its sections could be re-arranged and played freely. The music itself was meant to be heard but not listened to and not be the primary focus of the audience’s attention, something which was considered counterintuitive at the time. His first pieces in this style were written in 1917, but they were rarely performed during his lifetime. A sample of his work can be heard played by the Ars Nova Ensemble here.

For several decades, background music was given little importance. Even when music was functional such as film music, it was musically rich and had a clear direction that demanded the listener’s attention.

It was John Cage, an experimental composer, who revived Eric Satie’s work and considered him “indispensable”. He went on to perform Satie’s Vexations piece in 1949, during which a piano phrase is repeated 840 times to create a hypnotic effect. He was later inspired to write 4’33, a piece for piano or instrumental ensemble in which no instruments play, but instead listeners are drawn to pay attention to the background sounds inside and outside the performing venue. You can listen to a version below.

Following John Cage, the minimalist movement led by composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich aimed to use music to create a hypnotic effect. The direction these musicians took would set the stage for the birth of ambient music in the 1980s. Listen to Terry Riley’s pioneering work In C in which 53 short musical phrases can be repeated by musicians in any order.

In the 1960s, the emergence of Muzak brought music into rooms where people gather and thus defined a new age for the usage of background music. The music played could be of a variety of genres including popular, jazz, or light classical music performed by slow strings. The key feature distinguishing this form of music from other records released of those genres was that it was created to serve a specific environmental function where it would not be actively listened to.

The genre, also called “elevator music”, later evolved into lounge music in the 21st century which serves a similar purpose. The company that originally developed the genre, Muzak, was acquired by Mood Media in 2011; listen to some music here.

With the adoption of synthesizers and more sophisticated recording techniques in the 1970s, some artists took advantage of the opportunity to explore possibilities in the creation of new sonic worlds.

Electronic musician Isao Tomita was a key pioneer in the development of space music, which uses synthesisers and effects to create atmospheric sounds which would make good background music. Listen to one of his analog synthesizer arrangements from his 1974 album Snowflakes are Dancing, based on music by impressionist composer Claude Debussy.

Field recordist Irv Teibel released Environments from 1969 to 1979, a series of soundscapes featuring natural sounds. The many nature sound albums released since which help us to relax and meditate owe much to his initial experiments. With the resurgence of ambient music, the album has been made into an app which can be downloaded here.

Another trailblazer of the genre was electronic music group Tangerine Dream, who released their experiments with synthesized soundscapes in their album Zeit in 1972. You can listen to it below:

Ambient musician Brian Eno then recorded Discreet Music in 1975, an album which listeners are encouraged to listen to at a very low volume such that it is hardly audible. It was of the first ‘ambient music’ albums which was created for the purpose of background listening, similar to Satie’s furniture music conceived decades earlier. Here it is for you to listen to:

As the influence from Eastern countries started affecting Western musical culture, the genre of New Age emerged, which brought Eastern sensibilities to Ambient music. The genre started out as a movement which was centred on the idea that music can be effective as a means for relaxation and meditation, an insight that has been since verified with numerous scientific studies such as one carried out by University of Alberta.

The first album belonging to the New Age genre was Music for Zen Meditation released by jazz clarinettist Tony Scott in 1964. It consists of drones and long notes performed by a clarinet and Japanese instruments koto and shakuhaci. Listen to a preview on All Music.

Musician Stephen Halpern saw music as a means to resonate specific bodily areas and quiet the mind and body, and released Spectrum Suite for this purpose in 1975. It was considered a significant milestone in the development of background music for increasing wellness. Some of his recent music can be heard below:

New Age quickly became a diverse genre with artists creating music with varied influences. The music group Paul Winter Consort created Earth Mass to celebrate the sacredness of land, sky and sea through “earth music” in 1982. You can hear an excerpt from the work below:

A more recent innovator in new age music is Marconi Union, whose representative work Weightless created in 2011 is meant to be used as background music for long meditation sessions. The piece has been discovered to have many beneficial effects on heart rate and brain waves. Listen to it below:

Background music has gradually become ubiquitous and is present not only in venues we walk into, but also our homes as streaming services like Spotify have begun to offer a wide range of playlists aimed towards providing background music to activities like dining, studying, and exercising. A trend we have seen in recent years is a move towards context-based playlists rather than content-based playlists, which goes to show listeners’ increasing reliance on music to enhance the experience of their everyday activities.

The rising demand for background music has also brought many platforms and service companies to market that tailor background music to clients in hospitality and other sectors. The tech and services they provide are broadly broken down into:

1. Playback system via the cloud or devices installed in venue (e.g. PC or iPad)
2. Playlist scheduler for the client managed by the service provider and client
3. Playlists to populate the scheduler which are either broad / generic or highly curated and variable according to time of day and season or other temporal factors
4. Licensed content, enabling the service and client to use the music for background music purposes
5. Added features like Jukebox apps for patrons to choose music or playlists

The cornerstone of these providers are the playlists they provide and clients can choose from broad and generic playlists to highly curated playlists and a sonic identity created by the provider depending on the level of personalisation and cost that they choose.

These include Ambie, Auracle, Custom Channels, C-Burn (which also provides a white label service to other start-ups with licensed background music), Music Styling, Playlister, Soundjack and Soundtrack Your Brand.

With AI technology becoming more sophisticated and powering everything from personalisation, playlist recommendation to track classification and more, the possibilities for background music are ever expanding.

There are already several startups like Endel, brain.fm and Muvik Labs which use AI to generate music for a specific application, with many focusing on wellness or fitness. Our very own alumnus, LifeScore, is enabling the creation of real-time soundtracks that adapt to a listener’s environment or other contextual data. In the background music context this could create the ultimate personalised and activity-based experience.

It’s worth mentioning that while the background music sector is growing, some start-ups are working to track public performance plays better, for example WARM or Chartmetric, to enable more efficient payouts or data based decisions.

Our recent graduate Audoo is ensuring artists are paid royalties when their music is used in the background through its smart audio meter which listens to what’s being played, matches it to rights databases and then reports tracks played to Performing Rights Oranisations via API in realtime.