[1] 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.
[1] Burris-Meyer pioneered the use of "infrasound (sound with a frequency below the lower limit of human audibility)" in theater settings to "manipulate audiences' emotions subconsciously," wrote historian Prof. Gascia Ouzounian.
"[8] From 1938 through 1947 Burris-Meyer served as a consultant, Vice President, and Board member at Muzak Corporation, where he embarked on research to relieve boredom and fatigue through the subliminal use of mood-enhancing music.
[3] He produced a series of research reports which helped develop the "Stimulus Progression System, which defines what the Muzak brand is for decades to come," said Ted Houghtaling, Archivist & Digital Projects Librarian at Stevens Institute of Technology.
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.
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.
[1] Burris-Meyer's professional papers are catalogued at the Archives & Special Collections department at the Samuel C. Williams Library at the Stevens Institute of Technology.