mood music

English

Noun

mood music (uncountable)

  1. (music) Any of various styles of light popular music.
    • 2004, Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong, revised and expanded edition, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 69:
      Mood music on record had one important distinction: it functioned as Muzak's id. Muzak was confined mostly to moderate tempo arrangements with few if any distractions. But mood music indulged in volatile mood swings forbidden in the workplace: happy to grim, frantic to narcoleptic, sexy to robotic.
  2. (music) A type of functional music to influence the listener's mood.
    • 2025, Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, 1st edition, New York: Atria Books, →ISBN:
      Today, functional music is a defining phenomenon of the streaming era, especially mood music for wellness and productivity, which self-improvement culture increasingly renders the same.
  3. (figurative) The general mood around a topic.
    • 2016, Robert Dover, Europeanization of British Defence Policy, page 96:
      The mood music for Iraq had looked ominous from the end of 2001 and got demonstrably worse when President Bush delivered his now infamous 'axis of evil' State of the Union address (January 2002) […]
    • 2020, Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery, page 303:
      No organization had been more instrumental than the White Helmets in supplying the mood music for Western military intervention.

References

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.