That Muffled Loop

Songs on the phone often do not sound like songs. The beat is thin, the synthesizer muffled, the seam in the loop exposed too soon. Each time the melody is just about to open out, it is pressed back by that narrow path whose only job is to carry speech. The line originally only needed to let people understand a sentence, but now it is being asked to deliver a song, so the sound that arrives is always a little flattened. The highs are shaved down, the lows cannot get in, and before the tail has dispersed, the next bar has already dragged it back into place. It does not feel like a song being played so much as a song folded up and pushed through the crack of a door.

There is an old story about hold music that begins with electrical leakage. In a factory, a loose wire touched a metal girder, and the whole building briefly became like a radio, leaking a nearby station into a telephone that had been put on hold. What the person on hold heard was a building suddenly receiving a broadcast on the telephone’s behalf. What is charming about this story is not that it gives waiting a tender origin, but that the sound arrived crooked from the very beginning: no one decided to comfort anyone; rather, the current touched the wrong place, and the walls, girders, and lines together misdelivered music from elsewhere.

Some lines are even more afraid of silence that is too clean. Certain communication systems synthesize a little background sound so that people will not hear blankness as disconnection; hold music is much clumsier, but it too is close to this fear: the receiver must not become so empty that it seems already dead. People can endure a slower answer, but they find it hard to endure not knowing whether they are still inside a line. So sound is sent to occupy that small emptiness. It does not necessarily make the wait shorter; it only keeps the wait from immediately revealing pure vacancy.

Do not rush to find dignity for this kind of sound. Muzak once arranged music into fifteen-minute blocks, with tempo, volume, and brassiness gradually increasing, then let silence enter, all to regulate fatigue and speed. After the passage ended, the silence too was counted as part of the effect. Bad sound is sometimes not wounded music, but a tool at work, with even its pauses arranged into its gestures.

Back on the telephone, after that stretch of music has passed through the narrow path, only the most intelligible middle portion remains. The beat presses against the inside of the receiver, the decay is rubbed short, and after the melody has walked only a few steps it is sent back to the beginning. The seam in the loop keeps showing itself, as if the past dozens of seconds have not truly moved forward. You are not listening to a complete piece of music, but to a small segment forced to remain recognizable. It has to resemble music so that it does not seem like noise; yet it cannot resemble music too much, because this line was originally designed to leave only a narrow middle channel for speech.

And yet some people have heard this sound as a song. Someone, while waiting in a medical system, came to like Cisco’s default hold music, Opus No. 1. To hear it again, he could not request it on demand, could not play it the way one finds an ordinary track; he could only ask someone else to put him back on hold. There is something sharp in this. The liking is real, and so is the narrow path; that song was remembered, but it still has to borrow another act of being placed aside before it can appear again.

Then the loop on the phone returns to the beginning. The seam shows, the beat thins out, the tail shortens. The receiver has not fallen empty. The person still has not returned.