That Sound in Your Head: Guitar Tone Values in the Entrepreneurial Age

You are a customer walking through a large department store, pushing a cart, browsing the many offerings stacked neatly onto steel shelves and framed by boldly lettered price tags. The aisle is wide and easy to navigate. The floor is clean and decorated with the company's signature color scheme. The air resonates with the soft beeps from the checkout aisle, the rustling of merchandise being shifted on shelves, and the squeak of shoes on a tile floor. These sounds are all blanketed by a generally inoffensive music peppered with produced voice-overs announcing special deals. This is a place you have been before, even if you have never visited this particular location. It is comfortable, familiar, and seemingly transparent.

Retail spaces seem public and mundane, but they hold within them invisible and private worlds. Anyone who has worked in the retail industry will recognize a given store's publicness as a carefully constructed charade. Teams of workers have positioned these items before you enter, following weekly rotating shelving diagrams, often called "planograms," that are released by corporate headquarters. Some manufacturers have paid for eye-level shelf positioning or dedicated displays that increase the chances that you will pick their marginally more expensive brand of dish soap. The wide aisles, sometimes referred to as "action alleys," maneuver you past products with the highest profit margins. They weave a route that strategically shuttles you through nearly every department before you find the product you came for. Much of the surveillance and manipulation is sonic. Private conversations echo through in-ear radios between employees as they watch for shoplifters with the intensity of Cold War spies. Doors painted to blend in with the sales floor walls hide warehouses, bathrooms, offices, and break rooms, perhaps bearing small placards announcing them as for "Employees Only." Point of Sale systems, inventory control scan guns, and hidden computers bring up proprietary screens that detail pricing, gross margin, total daily sales numbers, product availability, and traffic flow analyses that require a senior employee's password to access.

Consumers are rarely aware of these invisible layers of surveillance. This mindset could also be said to be an intended result of a constructed corporate strategy. Workers who handle maintenance and inventory are encouraged to be as invisible as possible. Training regiments dictate which employees are to engage with customers, and which employees should fetch help when approached. Warehouse associates may be hesitant to answer a question for fear of accidentally angering a customer and being reprimanded, instead looking for a customer-facing employee who is properly trained to represent the company's image. Sociologist Chris Warhurst says that contemporary service-industry workers are encouraged to resemble "house-elves in Harry Potter," which is taken from a direct quote from one of his interlocutors. Specifically referencing housekeepers in the hotel industry, he says, "Guests forget that they exist and are, moreover, encouraged to forget them." Indeed, the same can be said of retail employees, perhaps with the caveat that when they are made visible by the shoppers' gaze they should follow procedure until they can safely become invisible again.

This dissertation takes place in such an environment: born from a recognition that the structures of work at a large musical instrument store mask important goings-on in modern musical life. Originally, I did not intend to critically examine my experience within the musical instrument retail industry. I came to work in retail, like many thousands of musicians before me, to support my other life goals. My previous experience with musical instrument shops led me to believe that they were benign spaces of commerce with little to say to the loftier projects of dissecting music cultures. As I experienced the hidden work of music retail, I decided to embark on a deeper examination of the store's role in shaping musical practice. Day after day I replaced price tags, shelved warehouses, attended sales meetings, and sold literally millions of dollars' worth of musical gear to all who entered. I talked about music, sound, and timbre with thousands of customers as they filled out credit card applications to purchase their dream instruments. I broke down boxes from guitars shipped from far flung places as I hung them in neat rows according to price, color, and style. The confluence of music, commerce, globalization, and sound felt so natural and I decided it was important to investigate — and to denaturalize.