To shed light on the inequities faced by women in music, producer, DJ, and performer Liliane Chlela structures her haunting telephonic mixtape by integrating the music of women producers and composers as though they were «hold music», purposefully interrupting them with «hold messages» to further underscore how their voices and music continue to be viewed as secondary.

«Hold music» typically informs callers that they are still connected to the call. It’s not really meant to be liked or even listened to, it's meant to communicate something specific: don’t hang up. When desperate callers requiring assistance have no other way to communicate with the authority in question, holding is their only hope.

According to marketeers and hold musicologists, hold music is designed to keep callers on the line. But studies comparing the rate of callers remaining on the line in the presence or absence of hold music show that there is only a 3% advantage for lines that do play hold music. The fact remains that 90% of callers tend to hang up within 40 seconds and callers listening to information while on hold will remain on the line for up to 3 minutes longer. While generic background music reminds the caller of waiting for help, replacing it with any other genre of music wouldn’t necessarily erase those negative connotations. It would just provide a buffer.

«Stay on the Line»

Hold messages are usually crafted and timed precisely (to be replayed about every 40 seconds) to achieve the desired result: keeping callers from hanging up and feeling positive about the company they are attempting to reach. Hold music rarely evokes a wide palette of emotions in callers; on the contrary, it is supposed to avoid sudden shifts in tempo, aggressive synthesizers, or anything too abrupt. Moreover, phones enhance voices whilst diminishing music. Telephone hold queues only have about 3500Hz of bandwidth. As the internet and cell towers are crowded with calls, phone carriers diminish the amount of bandwidth each call takes up. Mobile phones also use noise-canceling software that blocks out everything that isn’t speech.

In this mixtape, I propose to challenge the don’ts of hold music by featuring recent compositions of fellow female producers based in Beirut, juxtaposing them with generic hold messages strategically cued around expected hangup times. I also purposely choose to limit the bandwidth of the entire sonic intervention by mimicking the output of a random phone.

My selection for this intervention is a homage to the recent music of fellow female artists, who pave the way to a genuine, diverse, and inclusive scene but who remain stifled, almost as if they are holding.