Music in the Office

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,” writes Walt Whitman, whose mechanics and carpenters, shoemakers and housewives all sing as they work.Yet Whitman fails to mention the clerks, bookkeepers, or secretaries who occupied the offices of his day. Even then, apparently, music was taboo in the office.

I’m a person who loves to sing. I take voice lessons and sing in various choral groups. At home or in the car or even walking down the street I’m always singing -- everywhere except in the office. Sometimes I even warble out a few soprano bars from an oratorio in the parking structure on my way into work. Yet the minute I pass through the glass doors of our building, it’s as if someone clamped a hand over my mouth. I’m not exactly sure what would happen if I stood in the hallway and sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow” at the top of my lungs, but something tells me it wouldn’t be good. Singing in the office world is a thing one simply doesn’t do.

While singing or playing an instrument may be taboo, probably for good reason, listening has often – though not always – been considered more acceptable. In the 1980’s, my teenage son showed up at my office one day with a small “FM radio” in a wooden cabinet – one of the originals from the 1960s -- that we'd brought back when my mother moved into a retirement place. From then on, my job was a whole new ballgame. Instead of working in silence, I typed and filed to Brahms quartets and Stravinsky tone poems, listening to Detroit’s classical music station, DQRS. This was fine. I had a private office, the walls were reasonably thick, and no one ever complained. Sometimes people who came in to ask me for a research report would stop and try to guess what piece was being played, which would act as a conversation-starter.




Remembering how music had enlivened my last office job, when I assumed my present post in 2005, I purchased a homey, art-deco-style clock-radio at Best Buy and brought it to work with me, only to discover that the walls of our building were so thick that I could get only one station: the university’s own, which plays nothing but news. Next, I brought a boom-box in and a pile of CD's, but my boss, whose office was next door to mine and who was trying to write grant proposal narratives, complained. After that I endured several years of sterile silence, though it was during this time that I started singing outside of work, perhaps because, as an assistant, I felt I had no “voice” in my job. This helped. If I couldn’t have music around me at work, at least I could come to work filled with it.

Then one day I went downstairs to see another worker, whom I’ll call Doris. When I walked into Doris's office, I realized that she had headphones on and was listening to music as she worked. It was so loud that it rattled the headphones. It took me a few moments to get Doris’s attention, and meanwhile, I was kicking myself for being so foolish and behind the times. Of course, I thought, no one listens to music on a radio anymore, and no one listens so anyone else can hear. I could listen to music online --Duh!

The next day, I brought headphones to work and googled “Classical Music.” I was soon happily infatuated with WRCJ, a station sponsored by the Detroit Public Schools that plays "classical by day and jazz by night." Now I printed out reports to Puccini arias and got to hear all about local Detroit-area music events. But the classics WRCJ plays are on the light side, and I began to crave more serious classics. After some more googling, I wound up a devotee of Portland Public Radio, which suits my musical tastes a little better. And I’ve gotten to know a lot about Portland, though, where I have relatives to whom this makes me feel connected. 

This “music therapy” has had a bigger effect on how I feel about coming to work than almost any other adaptation I’ve made to office life. One of the biggest challenges for me at work has always been sensory, intellectual, and emotional deprivation. The sterility of the office situation can make me feel as though I’m stranded in a desert dying of thirst. When I hear music, it feels as though water is flowing in all around me from which I can drink and drink.

Now when I’m typing numbers into an online spreadsheet, music rushes in to fill the cracks and crevices, providing beauty for my senses, a badly needed emotional connection with composers, performers, and announcers, as well as food for my starved intellect. I can literally feel my dying neurons wake up and reconnect. Thanks to WRCJ and Portland Public Radio, I’m no longer brain dead at work.

Of course there are times when I still opt for silence. If I’m having to do a task that requires complex thinking, I usually turn the sound down on the speaker to which my headphones are connected. When the task is finished, I turn it up again and enjoy my reward.

While the flexible culture of my workplace allows me to listen to music with headphones, alas, not all office workers are so fortunate. This is where change is needed. As a mental health professional, I consider it an act of cruelty as well as an organizationally self-destructive act to withhold the benefits of listening to music from office workers. Not only is music emotionally healing, it can also make workers more productive. It is a known fact that not everyone concentrates best in silence. But if your boss is an unimaginative office natural who refuses to believe that anyone's mind works differently from his or hers, one option is to tell your boss that the headphones help you to block out chatter and other extraneous noises that distract you from your work. This should work. 

The only downside of listening to music with headphones is that it can make workers feel more cut off from one another. For this reason, I’ve always had a policy of taking them off any time a person approaches me to talk, even though I can still hear over the music.

Coming Next: The Psychological Challenges of Office Life.