Music From Airports
Over the weekend I took a trip down South to visit a dear friend and with the intention to achieve as little as possible, unless such achievements as inactivity and mellow-making are to be considered achievements. It was a rousing success in this a(nti)chievement regard, but several moments along the way got me thinking about sound environments, sound artifacts, and how hard it is to listen most of the time.
In order to save a whopping $20, I opted for a severely early flight out of New York, and due to some unfortunate circumstances I was obliged to stay out quite late the night before said flight. After a one-hour night’s sleep I caught a cab to LaGuardia and there commenced my first awkward interaction with sound for the weekend.
Still relatively buzzed from the night before, but mostly just exhausted, I slumped into a seat inside the terminal, facing the McDonald’s. Though the restaurant was shut for the night (this was 5am), a crew of fans had begun gathering near the closed gates awaiting the first McMuffins of the day (due around 5:45). As I observed this mass of hunger, I noted that though nearly every eatery and shop in the terminal was closed, though there was barely anyone even in the airport, the radio was on.
Certainly this isn’t, in itself, surprising. Plenty of places of business leave the music on even if nobody’s around. Muzak was invented, many decades ago, expressly to fill the air with sound at all hours (and to lull workers into maximum drone-ness, but that’s another story). What was intriguing was, for one, the mix of tunes playing: Bat For Lashes’ “Daniel” into Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart” into Glass Candy into Skynyrd, and so on, and for another, that any of this was audible. And yet amazingly, especially with the increasing grumbles (stomach and verbal) of the McD’s crowd, the tunes were only just audible.
I realized that never in all my time in airports, and certainly not in the past few months, where I’ve taken a number of flights, do I recall hearing music of any kind that I could recognize. Routinely noisy spaces, terminals are something I associate with harried movement, beeping peoplemovers, muffled announcements, the low roar of the aircraft outside, and centrally, cable news. Yet apart from headphones, never music. But this suggested it had been playing all the time, just another layer in a constantly noisemaking public space. Why in spaces where it would actually be helpful to have at least some quiet is there this insistence on unceasing din?
The cable news really got to me that last time I was in an airport: there is nowhere to go, virtually, to escape either the sound or image of CNN or whoever dominates a given airport. So sure. It’s the attractive concept of never-ending advertisement, or even the onus of perpetuating the 24-hour news cycle. But this recent radio episode took my thoughts to another level. It’s systemic, this whole affair. The airport wants to envelop us in sound not merely because it can accrue income from the cable stations, the music programmers, and whoever else is pumping in sound, but because we have come to feel that sounding spaces are spaces that care about us. Just as often you step from the terminal onto a plane and there’s more music on, even in the blessed lav. Never be alone. We wonder why noise levels rise but not every space is subject to traffic or industry or commerce. Airports would seem to present all three, but in fact offer spaces that could serve those who pass through by excising sound, if only people felt comfortable in quiet places. Decrepit through a terminal might be, sound is the enlivening force too. You don’t feel as though you’re in a forgotten room someplace, you feel as though you’re in the center of a buzzing, frenetic hub. Why do we need to feel this way everywhere, though? I hope to consider this question in the coming weeks.
Safely out of all terminals and ensconced in the idyll of my friend’s backwoods backyard, it was as quiet as I’ve been in many months. Yet we know quiet when we hear it, because we do hear it. I heard birds, buzzing insects, the occasional distant flyover, and very remotely the whoosh of traffic out on the main road. But I could hear all these things, distinctly, able to gauge distances between them and myself. As the weekend passed we listened to a lot of music out there, laying in our loungers chatting, and it felt like the listening was a lot deeper than I can recall from the past few weeks, where I am as often performing several tasks while listening as simply sitting there trying to take something in.
But back to the airport because this morning, on my regrettably necessary return to real life, passing through the Raleigh-Durham airport I noted an absence of music, and even the cable news proved escape-able. I wondered if the airport had made a positive decision about the relative anxiety already being experienced by most travelers and its potential role in maybe not making said anxiety worse? Nonsense, I thought. Like the “Wolfgang Puck To-Go” venue I tried vainly to locate, the airport simply hadn’t yet developed its sonic womb. To my delight, on arrival back in New York I entered the terminal and couldn’t hear anything at all, just a little bit of everything all at once and without pause.
