Classical: light chamber music for the waiting room

The preview at the top of this page is a separate piece of about 30 seconds, made from the Classical recipe and mastered like the station's tracks, which run longer.

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Classical at a glance

What will you hear on Classical?

Think chamber size, not concert hall: a handful of strings rather than a full orchestra, sometimes carrying the tune on their own and more often joined by flute, clarinet, bassoon, classical guitar or piano. These are the pairings you will hear most often:

• Flute over strings. A warm flute carries the melody over smooth, connected bowing, with cellos plucked softly underneath.
• Woodwinds and strings. Flute, clarinet and bassoon pass a cheerful tune back and forth over quiet chamber strings.
• Strings with pizzicato. The string section plays the tune itself, legato on top, over a bass line plucked with the fingers (that is what pizzicato means) instead of bowed.
• Guitar and strings. A nylon-string classical guitar trades the melody with soft chamber strings.

The station's other pairings put a mellow clarinet over strings, or let the string ensemble carry the tune with light piano underneath. Classical is designed so that the guitar and the piano always play with strings and never alone, which keeps it clearly apart from Acoustic Guitar and Soft Piano.

The pace is even. Tempos sit between 68 and 90 beats per minute, with a median of 76, and the music holds its pulse instead of stretching and slowing the way a lot of concert performance does. There is no drum kit and no timpani: the pulse comes from the tune and its accompaniment, often a plucked bass line. The sound is designed to be clean and modern, with no vinyl crackle or lo-fi texture.

Just as deliberately, Classical leaves out the parts of the classical repertoire that do not suit a front room: slow, sad movements and minor keys; big orchestral swells, crescendos and film-score drama; fast showpieces; marches and fanfares; brass, timpani, organ, harpsichord and harp; and heavy, lush vibrato. It also avoids anything like a bell, a chime or a beep that staff could confuse with a phone or a monitor. Original instrumental music, generated and mastered by eleMusic. How the music is made.

Where does Classical fit in a dental practice?

Its suggested rooms are the waiting room and the hallways. Walking through a typical office:

• Waiting room. The main home for Classical. It has more motion than the treatment-room stations and a tune you can follow, yet it stays light enough to sit in the background of a busy front room.
• Hallways. The other suggested home. Elevator Music has the same two suggested rooms; of the two, Classical is the small chamber group, designed without an organ, at a lower median tempo (76 against 90 BPM). One device can feed the waiting room and corridor speakers together. A device is one stream: a tablet feeding the ceiling speakers in several rooms counts once.
• Front desk. Not a suggested room for Classical; the stations suggested for the front desk are Light Jazz and Tropical.
• Treatment rooms. Classical can play here, but it is not the suggested pick. The treatment-room stations run slower: Calm's median is 58 BPM against Classical's 76.

From the Rooms panel, an owner or office manager signed in to the web player can move the waiting room off Classical for an afternoon and back again; only rooms connected with the access code can be controlled this way. Our guide to music for a dental waiting room goes further on choosing music for the front of the office.

When should you pick a different station?

Classical is one sound among 8. Pick another when the room calls for something it is built to avoid:

• Famous pieces patients will recognize. Classical is designed to steer clear of well-known themes, and its tunes are original. No vocals, no ads, no commercial recordings. Classical track titles name a scene, such as Orchard Morning Air or Sunny Garden Courtyard, rather than a composer or a numbered work.
• One instrument on its own. Soft Piano is a single acoustic piano at 62 to 84 BPM, and Acoustic Guitar is one or two fingerpicked guitars.
• Something slower for the chair. Calm drops to 50 to 70 BPM with felt piano and strings, and Ambient drops the melody altogether.
• Old-school lobby music. Elevator Music shares the waiting room and hallway suggestion but goes the other way on style: vibraphone, cocktail organ and strings over a brushed bossa sway, at 72 to 120 BPM.
• A groove. Light Jazz brings upright bass and brushes with an easy swing or a bossa lilt, and Tropical brings steel pan and marimba over a sunny island groove.

Which stations pair well with Classical?

Every device chooses its own station, so Classical out front does not decide what plays in the operatories. Here is one five-device layout that follows each station's suggested rooms:

That layout fits the Practice plan, which covers up to 5 devices for $24 a month. Every plan includes every music station, so mixing them costs nothing extra. See pricing, the guide to devices, speakers and rooms, or hear all 8 on the stations page.

Questions about Classical