I’m going to school to be a massage therapist. I got the table, and today I picked up some CD’s of music with “nature sounds”- got a real great deal, package of four for ten bucks at one of these “giant limited time book sale places”. These places set up shop in a disused storefront and have books and CD’s laid out on folding tables or really cheaply made racks at way less than the retail price. There were some really good books there, but nothing I was in the mood to buy at the time, until I spotted the CD’s.
Anyhoo, these CD’s are actually good- I like them enough that I’m contemplating buying another four disk set put out by the same company. Hell, four CD’s for ten bucks, it would be a worthwhile investment to have a variety of music for when I have people over to practice on, or when I get out working, provided the music isn’t piped in. They weren’t marketed as “massage music”, but they are quite soothing. But most “soothing music” I hear, whether in class or clinic, or playing at massage/back care supply shops is, well, crappy. It’s either just exactly the wrong sort of music to go with the nature sounds, or it has a lot of empty aural space that sounds like some recording engineer forgot to mix in an instrumental track, or it’s actually grating. One of my instructors is very fond of a CD of pseudo-Celtic sounding music that really, really gets on my nerves (note to creative types- mizmar is not a good instrument to use in Celtic music. It doesn’t sound that great in most Middle Eastern music either, unless you’re the guy who plays for Hossam Ramzay). A lot of the electronic music annoys me, too. I don’t dislike electronic music, I used to be a regular listener to a program of “space music” that was intensely cool, but most of this music that is marketed as being calming, well, isn’t.
What gives here? Why is so much of the music marketed to massage therapists as soothing background music to give massage to so damned annoying?
