Functional music designed for the periphery acquires haunting power it never had as foreground.

Evidence

Ghost Box explore a sonic continuum which stretches from the quirkily cheery to the insinuatingly sinister. The most obvious predecessors lie in ‘functional music’, sounds designed to hover at the edge of perceptibility, not to hog centre-stage: signature tunes, incidental music, music that is instantly recognizable but whose authors, more often (self-)styled as technicians rather than artists, remain anonymous. The Radiophonic Workshop (whose two ‘stars’, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, became widely recognised only after their deaths) would be the obvious template. House agrees: ‘I think the key reference is the Radiophonic Workshop, which is wildly experimental (Britain’s electronic avant garde, the equivalent of GRM Pierre Schaeffer in France etc.) but it’s also incredibly evocative of radio and television with which we grew up. It’s got a sort of duality to it, it’s haunting in its own right but also serves as a memory trigger. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 314

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Degrading music into audio-fog makes it more evocative rather than less — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 264; What was background attention now evokes the past most powerfully — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 325; Muzak-era composers produced tight compact arrangements obscured by functional branding — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 328