Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical use of music to produce more efficient, more committed, industrial workers. First emerging in academia early in the twentieth century, psychological interest in the industrial application of music had grown into a topic of popular interest and government investigation by the 1940s. Catalysed by the need for vast increases in production and the desire to cultivate 'citizenship' amongst industrial workers which the Second World War produced, consideration of how music could be employed as an affective soundtrack in factories-to raise employees' work rates, to increase their efficiency, to combat fatigue and boredom, to improve morale, to access and manipulate their emotions and loyalties-became a prominent area of psychological research. This paper examines that psychological research and its largest scale application in the BBC radio show Music While You Work, broadcast daily to millions of British factory workers from 1940 until 1967. The paper focuses particularly on conceptualizations of music's affective power and its utilization to exert 'emotional control' over spaces of work and the working self. This paper is centrally concerned with the practice of Music While You Work as a programme broadcasting specifically for factory spaces, and how this confronted the BBC's music policies for a national and domestic audience, impacting on the radical nature of the affective soundtrack to work which was produced.

The Art of Doing (Geographies of) Music

“…It is not a world apart, but an integral part of everyday life: it is as mundane (and as special) a process of social elaboration as working, homemaking, playing, or politicking. This is not to denigrate the role that music can play in relieving the drudgery and dullness of daily routines (Anderson, 2004a;Jones, 2005). Rather, our point here is that practices of musicking, which might be considered mundane or routine by musicians, are a necessary part of preparing a musical event.…”

Sonic geographies

“…Such research is also mostly focused on music. It includes: analyses of the relationship between song lyrics and identity-making at different geographical scales (Lehr, 1983;Yarwood and Charlton, 2009); accounts of the role of sound and music in place-based identities (Boland, 2010;Halfacree and Kitchin, 1996); research on how music and sound enact power and politics (Gallagher, 2011;Johnson, 2011;Morley and Somdahl-Sands, 2011;Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009); archival and interview-based research on the role of sound and music in the workplace, the city, the countryside and everyday life (Bull, 2000;Corbin, 1998;DeNora, 2000;Garrioch, 2003;Jones, 2005;Matless, 2005); archival work to reconstruct sonic histories (Coates, 2005;Smith, 2004b), which is sometimes termed acoustic archaeology (Smith, 2004a); and traditional ethnographic methods to locate the role of music in mediating memory (Anderson, 2004).…”

The Environmentalization of space and listening

“…Historically, for example in times of pre-industrial work, a work song functioned "as a tool" (Korczynski, 2003, p. 318) and helped to organize work processes . Also, in Fordism/Taylorism the industrial production work in factories was often accompanied by music in order to combat boredom and improve work ethics, as studies of BBC's program Music While You Work has shown (Jones, 2005). As the recent decades have fundamentally changed mobile technologies and individualized the way people listen to music, music consumpissn 1904-500X SoundEffects | vol.…”