Comments on: Music for Public Restrooms http://carolineabrown.com/2008/12/music-for-public-restrooms/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:44:43 -0800 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 By: Greg Borenstein http://carolineabrown.com/2008/12/music-for-public-restrooms/comment-page-1/#comment-7 Greg Borenstein Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:23:27 +0000 http://itp.nyu.edu/~cab513/blog/?p=296#comment-7 This is a funny and cool hack and it has an interesting relationship to Eno Music For Airports. If you ever hear Eno talk about that project, he describes it thusly. He says that he's terribly afraid of flying. And if you go to airports, all the standard musak has a very strong and clear message: your are not going to die. He found that message terrifying because it just made him think more about dying without really reducing his fears. So, what he decided to make was music that would actually reduce his fears, not by convincing him that dying in a plane crash was less likely, but by reducing his sense of the the importance of his own life: by making dying seem like less of a big deal. The purpose of Music For Airports is to make you value your own life less! And that's where his interest in the time-extending structures, lack of figure/ground distinctions, and all the other ideas we think of as being key to Ambient music as a genre come from; they are strategies for taking you out of yourself, reducing how much you value your own life as something separate from everything else. What you're doing here is different, but interestingly related: you're using the sounds from one physical context with a different (and much preferred) psychological impact and trying to use them to inject that psychological impact into a different physical context in order to reduce its unpleasantness. It's like a pragmatic cog sci hack version of his somewhat mystical approach. Sounds like a cool project. This is a funny and cool hack and it has an interesting relationship to Eno Music For Airports. If you ever hear Eno talk about that project, he describes it thusly. He says that he’s terribly afraid of flying. And if you go to airports, all the standard musak has a very strong and clear message: your are not going to die. He found that message terrifying because it just made him think more about dying without really reducing his fears. So, what he decided to make was music that would actually reduce his fears, not by convincing him that dying in a plane crash was less likely, but by reducing his sense of the the importance of his own life: by making dying seem like less of a big deal. The purpose of Music For Airports is to make you value your own life less! And that’s where his interest in the time-extending structures, lack of figure/ground distinctions, and all the other ideas we think of as being key to Ambient music as a genre come from; they are strategies for taking you out of yourself, reducing how much you value your own life as something separate from everything else.

What you’re doing here is different, but interestingly related: you’re using the sounds from one physical context with a different (and much preferred) psychological impact and trying to use them to inject that psychological impact into a different physical context in order to reduce its unpleasantness. It’s like a pragmatic cog sci hack version of his somewhat mystical approach. Sounds like a cool project.

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