And I realized I was old. "I Am the Walrus," John Lennon's daffy, Joyceian screed about experts and texperts, seemed unMuzakably designed to resist that kind of tampering. I remember sort of enjoying having the tune in my head, till I realized what it was. All things must pass.

Seattle-based, privately-held Muzak Limited Partnership is not an especially huge company, with annual sales well under $100 million. Yet the brand name is one of a handful known to almost everybody, like Ford or Frito or Starter jackets. Everyone knows Muzak -- they're the "elevator music" company, beaming their dull music earthward from satellites parked high in the heavens.

Studies have shown that Muzak's "stimulus progression" -- an hourly cycle of gradually increasing intensity that unconsciously enlivens and dynamizes human activity -- really does work. Workers work faster and more accurately. Absenteeism drops. Shopper shop more leisurely and buy more items. Cows -- though this is admittedly not human activity -- give more milk, with higher fat content.

What is going on is really an example of be the celebrated "Hawthorne effect," after productivity experiments conducted in the 1920s on telephone factory workers at Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant in Chicago.

People, those experiments demonstrated, respond well to continual change in the work environment. Brighten the lights, paint the walls bright white, move chairs around -- anything works, even bad changes like dimming the lights or painting the walls gray. Muzak, depending on your tastes, can be either white or gray paint.

The music isn't supposed to be "good" -- you don't want workers riding the elevator all day, popping their fingers to the beat. But good taste in music, as in tuna fish, is subjective -- you could not possibly program office music everyone will like.

And even if you could, that supermusic would still not lure employees into the office a half hour earlier every day, or persuade them to stay a half hour later. But soft, marginally offensive music -- not Mantovani any more, but maybe a tune by Pat Metheny or Andreas Vollenweider -- can take the edge off a day of rough commercial interactions. Muzak somehow freshens us, and provides, like a laxative, a coating to the fatigue that overtakes us during the day.

It's all very scientific and manipulative, and the Hawthorne Effect is a bit much for an age which claims, as ours does, to have outgrown the "cog in the machine" ideas of Frederick Taylorism. ("And on vibes, Big Brother. Tasty licks, Bro!")

Supposedly we're all empowered now, and not spending the whole day giving x-widgets a single three-quarter turn twist. What need have we, in our reengineered workers' paradises, to combat repetitiousness? Rigghht.

But you sense, as with Big Brother, a benevolence in the manipulation. I might not request Muzak while in the dentist's chair, but like Novocain it has its palliative points. Like the condemned man an hour before midnight, sent a rabbi instead of a priest, good enough in a tight corner is good enough.

But oh, the voicemail Muzak they make you listen to while you wait for a customer service representative. You don't call these numbers to be put on hold. You need that plane ticket, or that stock quote, or that showdown with the phone rep over the battery recharger that has reduced your home to smoking rubble, with a few charred pipes protruding. You don't want a Romanian jazz combo playing "The Year of the Cat."

Muzak claims not to be behind all of the Muzak in the world. Lots of companies simply pipe in FM radio, or queue up a half dozen CDs for continuous play through the workday -- which, by the way, is illegal, unless they arrange to pay royalties.

I have to confess that's what I do -- play jazz or new age music or classical chestnuts in the background all day while I work. Many times I have hit a wall in my work, and realized that I'm not clicking, doing the kind of work I can do, because a saxophone solo is stealing just a bit too much of my attention, swiping it from the vital report I am writing on corporate benevolence at Microsoft. ("And on clavinet, Bill Gates -- go, Bill!").

In my amateurishness and unscientificness, I tend to program too many highs and lows, too much contrast, way too much saxophone, and worse, I neglect to program in a staged stimulus progression, which is key, absolutely key.

Needless to say, from a productivity standpoint, the Spike Jones is right out.

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