Opus 1 hold music8/28/2023 a key or button, will connect the incoming call to a source of program material, e.g. The solution? “It is an object of the present invention to provide a system of the character described which upon actuation of a hold instrumentality, e.g. Patent Office, humbly titled “Telephone Hold Program System.” “In the course of receiving telephone calls,” it began, a bit grandly, before settling into the problem at hand: What to do about that dead silence the caller endured while calls were transferred, their respective parties chased down? Operators were supposed to check in again on callers who had been waiting but what if they got busy? “In any event,” the application went on, “listening to a completely unresponsive instrument is tedious and calls often are abandoned altogether or remade which leads to annoyance and a waste of time and money.” “Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn’t be worse,” go the opening lines Elizabeth Bishop’s “While Someone Telephones.” “Minutes of a barbaric condescension.” But there was a more elemental problem with the “silent hold”: There was no way to know if one was still actually “on the line.”īut in the spring of 1962, an application appeared in the U.S. Presumably those emotions became less mixed as the telephone became more familiar, and the person placed too long on hold would have plenty to say. Handel had written tafelmusik-literally, “table music,” for guests at table-but could he have known he also writing telefonmusik? * (Notes Hogwood: “Handel was writing pure entertainment music-music on the water rather than about water.”) How strange that this 18 th-century riverboat dance music should now provide the sonic backdrop to the eventual fulfillment of a 21 st-century customer service experience. I would not say it came “pouring” through so much as “dribbling” monaural, faded by distance, troubled by hiccupy signal dropouts.Īs I listened, I became aware of the oddity of the situation: Water Music is a work executed by a German-born, England-adopted composer-described by Christopher Hogwood as “difficult, unusual, over-interested in food, independent, larger than life in all sense and short tempered with it”-for a politically important “water party” on the river Thames in the summer of 1717. About that music: While recently put on hold-after first enduring the “confession” ritual of pressing telephone buttons to indicate why I was calling-the sounds of the overture to Handel’s Water Music came through the earpiece of my iPhone.
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