Harold Burris-Meyer

Harold Burris-Meyer (1902-September 27, 1984)

During a long and varied career, Burris-Meyer worked at the Muzak Corporation, directed the first stereophonic recordings for Bell Labs in 1941, experimented with the Vocoder, and served as sound designer on thirteen Broadway shows, as well as on productions for the Metropolitan Opera and the Federal Theater Project.

Education and academic affiliations

Burris-Meyer was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from the City College of New York in 1923 and a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 1926. During the early 1930s, Burris-Meyer became a consultant at Bell when the company was experimenting with stereophonic sound transmission, including tests with live orchestras.

He developed techniques to use sound to manipulate human emotions, particularly in theatrical settings. Burris-Meyer "has been working for years to put the control of sound in the drama on a scientific basis," said a June, 1940 article in The New York Times. "If he had his way, speech, prop sounds, background music, beating of hoofs, thunder, whatever the dramatist demands, would be scored and 'played' from a control board just as if it were a musical composition. ... e has gone far in showing that it is as feasible to make and control sound as it is to make and control light." Burris-Meyer told the Times, "We have tried to control sound so that the artist in the theatre can use it to make a good show. ... he limitations on the auditory component of the show are off. The players may speak with the tongues of men and of angels. With sound you can compel the audience to laugh, to weep. You can knock them off their seats, you can lay them in the aisles."

His work with mood music was spotlighted in a 1942 Time magazine article, which said:

Professor Harold Burris-Meyer, director of research in sound at Stevens Institute of Technology, released results of elaborate tests with factory music from Bach to boogie-woogie. Once, in a big Philadelphia laundry, his experiments were so shattering that one worker burst into tears and ran home. But his overall findings show that scientifically planned music increases factory production by 1.3 to 11.1% … Such programs have been found to produce speed and contentment in such diverse establishments as the Lockheed plane plant and Manhattan's National City Bank. In the editorial rooms of the Reader's Digest editors are treated with twelve to 20 minutes of planned harmony every hour.

Work with U.S. military

During World War II, Burris-Meyer was a member of the U.S. War Department Planning Board, and served in the U.S. Navy, reaching the rank of commander. Under National Defense Research Committee sponsorship, he led a program at Stevens which studied potential military applications of sound control and psychoacoustics. One outgrowth of this program was the development of Project Polly, an aircraft that blared speech from a mile up; it was used behind enemy lines to encourage peaceful surrenders. Further papers are housed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library.