The notion of background music presupposes the possibility of sound that is present within a practice while remaining neutral with respect to attention, bodily coordination, and temporal organization. This paper argues that this presupposition is structurally incoherent. The argument is not phenomenological and does not concern subjective experience, aesthetic meaning, or cultural interpretation. Instead, it proceeds from a constraint-based ontology of practice. The central claim is that neither sound nor silence is merely something that occurs in time. Both function as factors that structure temporal flow. Since practical activity is constituted through specific regimes of temporal coordination, any sustained acoustic condition—whether articulated as sound or enforced as silence—necessarily intervenes in those regimes. By analyzing the structural conditions under which practices remain temporally viable, the paper demonstrates that what is commonly labelled “background music” must resolve into one of several non-neutral modes: regime-supporting sound, degraded sound, privatized sound, or intrusive sound. No configuration satisfies the conditions required for genuine neutrality. The concept of background music is therefore not merely empirically inaccurate but structurally impossible.
Polovinkin Alexey (Sat,) studied this question.