Consultant Uses Music to Help Foster Productivity and Health

Forget easy listening or plain silence. If you’re on hold at Acclivus Corp., you’ll get an earful of Mozart or Bach, and, theoretically, come back on the line a little bit happier--and maybe smarter.

The Dallas-based consulting firm started putting classical music on its phone lines about two years ago. The tip came via New Age “music healer” Don Campbell of Boulder, Colo.

And at Acclivus, which conducts corporate workshops on improving workplace learning and efficiency, instructors now play music between classes and during reading periods, also on Campbell’s suggestion.

Despite a lack of hard data, Acclivus President Randall Murphy says music has made a difference.

“We know it is a trend anecdotally,” Murphy said. “People have more energy late in the afternoon where workshops are supported by music than not.”

But it’s not background music, said the chief executive, such as that piped into supermarkets and malls to lull people into buying. By contrast, he said, Campbell uses music to stimulate.

A classically trained musician, Campbell, 47, had a busy career from the 1960s to the 1980s as an organist at an Episcopal cathedral in Haiti, music critic for a newspaper in Tokyo, choirmaster and conductor.

In 1982 he developed a lump in his chest from a degenerative bone disease. He cured himself by toning, which is like humming, he said, for 35 hours straight. “I call it my nervous breakthrough,” he told Reuters in the fall, at a sound healers’ conference in Epping, N.H. “It was one of those startling moments when I surrendered to sound.”

Now at his Institute for Music, Health and Education in Boulder, Campbell teaches others how tones and songs affect mood and learning ability. He charges $350 a weekend or $1,950 for a 15-day seminar on “The Power of Sound.”

He takes his message into Fortune 500 companies, such as International Business Machines, working with individual employees on their breathing, the octaves at which they speak (lower is more soothing), delivery and the “psychoacoustics” of the workplace.

When Campbell goes to a company, he analyzes the environment to determine how sound or music can make workers more productive and less stressed. Speaking from Boulder, he said he might suggest music in various forms, either through headphones for an individual, or piped in to a particular room or department.