Transit Hubs See Benefits of Baroque in the Background

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The New York Sun

At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, travelers purchase Greyhound and Peter Pan bus tickets to the tunes of George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach.

In the general arrival areas of La Guardia, Newark International, and John F. Kennedy International airports, a light classical soundtrack accompanies the check-in process, with sonatinas bleeding seamlessly into preludes courtesy of the music engineers at the Muzak Corporation.

On Pennsylvania Station’s main mezzanine, travelers are accompanied by string quartets and flute piccolos piped in over loudspeakers.

Baroque has become the background music of choice at some of the city’s busiest and arguably least aesthetically pleasing transit hubs.

“It calms the frenzied traveler,” an Amtrak spokesman in charge of Pennsylvania Station customer relations, Richard Rubel, said.

Pop music was the soundtrack in Pennsylvania Station until 1995, but the mix of instrumentalized Beatles songs and top 40 hits proved irritating to customers and did little to improve the station’s atmosphere, according to Mr. Rubel. The switch to baroque music from pop was intended to add some much-needed gravitas to the station, he said, and to act as a deterrent against loitering. When classical music was piped into convenience store parking lots, loitering decreased, a study has shown.

At the Long Island Rail Road terminal on Pennsylvania Station’s lowest level — the home turf of regular commuters where tourists rarely venture — top 40 hits are still piped in.

Music experts say baroque music, composed to serve as background music, best soothes the preoccupied, traveling mind.

“There’s an organization and structure behind 18th-century baroque music that people find relaxing,” the music director of WNYC, George Preston, said. “It doesn’t have the sort of emotional baggage that a Tchaikovsky symphony might have.”

Bach and Handel composed music for royal audiences preoccupied with boating, dining, and conversations over cards. In other words, their fugues and string quartets have been interrupted and talked over for centuries.

“The beauty of the Brandenburg Concertos is that you don’t necessarily have to invest yourself in them all the way,” Mr. Preston said. “It greatly enhances the atmosphere without distracting you very much.”

Background music also plays a camouflage effect when used in high-traffic public spaces like bus depots and train stations. “It masks conversation,” a psychology professor at New York University whose work focuses on music’s effects on emotion, Edgar Coons, said. “That’s a big reason why they play it.”

Passengers also say that unattractive transit hubs seem more pleasant with the addition of baroque music in the background. “The classical music makes Pennsylvania Station feel like a nicer, safer place than it might actually be,” a traveler, Yosef Golubchik, said as he arrived in Manhattan from New Jersey.

“It makes it more festive,” a tourist from Iowa, Carrie Miller, said.

Mr. Rubel says he considers Pennsylvania Station’s soundtrack “one tool of many in the comprehensive program to make it a safer, cleaner, and more efficiently run transportation facility.”

Stations that have little to compensate for, such as the light-filled Grand Central Terminal and the landmark building that houses Amtrak’s 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, play no music at all.

A spokesman for Metro-North railroad, Daniel Brucker, said Grand Central Terminal would never play music in its halls. “The natural din is really like the heartbeat of the city,” he said.

Studies also show that rates of robbery, vandalism, and assaults on transit employees were all lowered significantly in London subway stations where classical music was played.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has never considered bringing music to its trains or stations. “It’s never been broached,” an MTA spokesman, Paul Fleuranges, said. “I don’t know that New Yorkers would go for it, or that we’d invest in the infrastructure needed to do that.”


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