The Ambiance of Life: Music in Public Spaces

Jim Walker
Mar 7, 2023
Mar 24, 2023

When you think about goals for a public place, establishing an atmosphere for socializing is high on everyone’s list. Active and accessible public spaces are vital for helping people, even strangers, connect and communicate with each other—something we need now more than ever.  

We also know that art draws us together through universal languages ranging from dance to design. For this reason, public space programmers, like our artist-led team at Big Car Collaborative, incorporate cultural experiences to bring sound and vision to the experience. And, as an important additional benefit, this allows us to financially support artists who perform and engage with the public. 

Indianapolis-based band The Brothers Footman perform on Downtown Indy’s mobile stage at Circle Spark Fest in October of 2022. Credit: Jim Walker

Music is often the first move to activate public spaces. This might be a singer with an acoustic guitar, a jazz trio, a DJ, or built-in speakers with a playlist. The idea is that music makes a place feel alive. 

True. But music, like all sound, can have both positive and negative effects on our bodies and how we feel in a place. For this reason, music in public spaces should be carefully considered as a complementary element to the overall comfort and ambience. 

The Social Life of Music

Too often—in all kinds of otherwise social spaces—we see (and hear) people struggling to talk without shouting. Studies reveal that loud atmospheres create stress for people and, in restaurants and bars, lead them to eat faster and drink more to try to get comfortable. And they don’t stay as long. This isn’t how we want public spaces to work.

On the flip side, music can certainly calm and heal. Improvisational jazz drummer Milford Graves made music from heartbeats and then showed how the biofeedback of hearing this music could help grow new heart cells from stem cells. Graves found that when someone hears and experiences a healthy heartbeat—and even drums at that beat—this can even help the heart get back to beating correctly. 

A study by Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson of Mindlab International showed that calming instrumental, classical, and ambient music can help reduce a person’s anxiety by up to 65 percent—slowing the listener’s heart rate, reducing blood pressure, and lowering levels of the unhealthy stress hormone, cortisol.

Indianapolis musician Landon Caldwell plays in front of Monument Circle in the summer of 2022 with his music through speakers all around the monument. Credit: Jim Walker

At the risk of seeming like the guy pounding his broom handle on the ceiling because the party’s too loud upstairs, I suggest music volume levels, which can also be dangerous to our hearing, should be set to fit the site and situation. Too often, I’ve experienced public spaces where the music is just too loud.

It’s understandable. People performing music see it as the centerpiece of what’s happening. Whoever is responsible for sound has the main objective of everybody hearing the music and isn’t likely considering that guests want to talk with each other or vendors at an adjacent market. The musicians and sound techs aren’t there to consider the balance between entertainment and social objectives. That starts with whoever is managing the space, the people throwing the party. 

I recommend these folks consider an approach like French composer Erik Satie’s “Furniture Music” innovation from the early 1920s. Like those of John Cage and Brian Eno in later generations, his thought was that music is part of and can include the ambience of life. When he premiered this in a Paris gallery, people stopped conversing and sat to listen. Satie shouted at them: “Talk, for heaven’s sake! Move around!”

For Satie, the idea was to create “a music which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together.” 

Sometimes, a concert is the right thing in a public space. The music is going to come first. That’s the idea. But when music is there to provide ambience, we can make choices, like the kind of songs and volume level, so people can comfortably talk and walk around—no shouts from Satie required. 

A Playlist for Public Space

Over the last year, our staff has been teaming up to create a 308-song, 22-hour playlist of music we like for public spaces. It’s nearly all music without vocals, which makes conversation easier. This is everything from piano songs by Satie, to jazz, to world music, to Eno’s style of electronic ambient. You’re welcome to use it or stream our station at your space.

Our work with sound at Monument Circle, a public place where we work in partnership with Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis embraces and anticipates being in the center of a city filled with noise, like Satie including the clanks of silverware at dinner. 

Indianapolis musicians Eric Salazar (left foreground) and Rob Funkhouser (right foreground) perform a live soundtrack to an outdoor screening of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as part of SPARK Monument Circle in Indianapolis in the fall of 2022. Credit: Jim Walker

At Big Car, we operate an art and community radio station, WQRT FM, that broadcasts this music citywide during program hours at this very site. Monument Circle features an amazing sound system from which we play “Circle Sounds” via WQRT. Between songs, we share audio projects artists create at the Circle, including commissioned site-specific poems and haikus submitted by the public. We also work with local musicians to perform live—utilizing the Circle’s surround-sound speakers. Through this kind of thoughtful curation, we provide a little respite amid the sensory overload of downtown.

Whether it’s a performance or a playlist in public space, we often listen to the words of Brian Eno on how music fits with life. “Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think,” he wrote in the liner notes to 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

Sound good?

Jim Walker is the executive director of Big Car Collaborative, the Indianapolis-based nonprofit arts organization he co-founded in 2004. He serves as lead artist on Spark, Big Car’s program focused on activating public spaces. Much of his work, with partner and co-founder Shauta Marsh, happens on a formerly half-vacant block where Big Car owns 20 properties. These include 16 long-term affordable houses for artists and Tube Factory, a contemporary art museum and community space.

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