Music Notes|

By Sophie Haigney, NPR | Someone is late for the conference call, so the music starts. “Well, I’ve been sitting here all day,” the song begins, sort of croony, with a vaguely country affect — the kind of opening that leads you to expect there is, somewhere, an ex-lover who probably isn’t coming back. A certain variety of pining. But then, a few bars in, a turn: “Yes I’m waiting on this conference call, all alone. And I’m on hold, yes I’m on hold… I hope it’s not all day, ey!”

It’s a panoptic experience, being on hold while listening to someone singing about being on hold. Depending how long it takes for someone else to join the call, you could be listening for awhile. The music builds as time goes on, culminating in a spoken verse that begins: “Well, let me tell you all a story / about a man who was on hold all day…” This unusually self-aware song is the default music for a conference call service called UberConference, where “I’m On Hold” plays on a loop for anyone who calls in early, on almost every call that doesn’t start exactly when it’s scheduled to (or doesn’t ever start at all). It’s selected by nine out of ten call organizers, and plays over a million times per month, says Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad, owner of UberConference.

It’s the only song Alex Cornell has ever written. Cornell was one of the co-founders of UberConference, and in addition to being a designer, is a singer and guitar player who had always found songwriting frustrating. “Then I just came to it one day,” he says. “I just wanted to write a pleasant melody designed to be heard over the phone.” With encouragement from Walker, Cornell started messing around with the lyrics. He wrote and recorded it in one night, in 2012, as a voice note on his phone — and thus, this self-aware hold song was born, and lives on, seven years later.

“That self-awareness came from wanting to experiment with this genre of hold music, that I’m not even really sure is a thing,” Cornell said.

If it is a genre, hold music, it’s fair to say, is a troubled one with few hits. It’s not really meant to be loved or even listened to — it’s meant to communicate something specific: Don’t hang up. (Cornell makes this plea specifically at the end of his song.) Silence is believed to be a death knell for phone calls — people will simply think the line is dead and hang up. This is true even on non-hold calls; it’s why phone companies transmit something called a “comfort tone” over phone lines, a barely audible synthetic noise that signals a connection is still there.

Hold music was born in the early 1960s, a few years after the first transatlantic phone cable was laid, between Newfoundland and Scotland. As a greater volume of calls were being placed, especially to big businesses, the phenomenon of being asked by the switchboard operator to please “hold” — a word that connotes both the cradling of a telephone and a clinging on to one’s patience — increased in turn. An industry legend is that Alfred Levy, a factory owner, discovered the potential of hold music accidentally when an exposed wire in his telephone system was picking up the broadcast of a radio next door. Levy submitted a patent in 1966 for a “Telephone Hold Program System,” which described the psychological frustrations of being on hold in prim detail. “Courteous telephone practice requires that a held caller be assured at reasonable intervals that the party to whom he wishes to speak still is busy but the pressure of her duties may prevent the operator from so advising the incoming caller so that he may be bereft of even this small consolation,” Levy wrote. “In any event, listening to a completely unresponsive instrument is tedious and calls often are abandoned altogether or remade which leads to annoyance and a waste of time and money.” So, Levy proposed, some music might be in order — much like the kind that was increasingly broadcast to restaurants and bars and department stores by Muzak.
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Go here to read more:
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/757544079/the-many-requirements-of-hold-music-a-genre-for-no-one

Other resources:
https://www.zendesk.com/blog/new-hold-music-has-arrived/

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