I was recently sitting in a hotel lobby listening to Spotify and I was surprised to find myself almost in tears. Not because it was music that got me there: the right song has always been able to move me. But because of what the music was: erm, the Qantas soundtrack.

It was those two 15-minute orchestrated pieces heard perhaps millions of times by travellers boarding and disembarking Australia’s national carrier. It was a surprise. Too little sleep, I wondered, or the ghost of travel past?

For those of us who relied upon travel for work and to connect with family and friends, these past two years have been a tough adjustment. I’d always pigeonholed travel soundtracks as background music, when really they are often thoughtful sound design – composed or curated to be functional, whether to calm us, tap emotions, or connect us to a brand.

Stephanie Tully, chief customer officer at Qantas, says the release of their soundtrack to Spotify and Apple Music is a response to customers who told the airline they miss flying as much as getting to the destination. “And this sensory experience will help fill the temporary void while some of us can’t fly because of border closures,” Tully says.

The music was commissioned specifically for the airline and was composed by Haydn Walker from Sydney sound design studio Song Zu. “They wanted [the soundtrack] to be some sort of journey, to have a contour to it, an arc,” Walker told Song Zu’s Spotlight podcast.

The track was aimed at relaxing passengers, and Walker says Qantas wanted it to “feel Australian”, echoing much of the music the airline had previously played on board. Australian vocalist and guitarist Dylan Wright helped to create a sense of modern Australia, Walker says. “Such a beautiful voice – one of my favourite falsettos but kind of current sounding.”

But the music choices the airline makes are not without controversy. Qantas decided to remove music programming from their inflight entertainment portfolio in 2018 due to a lack of usage. In response, Dean Ormston, the chief executive of Australian music copyright organisation Apra Amcos, tweeted that a “lack lustre curation of music focused audio/video could be the cause” of flyers’ disinterest. He also urged the carrier to take “Aussie music to the world”.

While airlines like Qantas employ the talents of composers like Walker, there are those who scour the existing canon of modern music to stitch together soundscapes with, say, hotel design.

Andrew Lewis is a DJ turned music curator who works with hotel brands like Ovolo and QT. “You have this beautifully designed hotel so the sense of sight is handled, and then to have the music be your sense of sound – it’s another touchpoint that you can really capture people with,” Lewis says.

To help his process, Lewis spends time in the hotels and understands what they are trying to achieve through design, art curation, furniture and the space itself. He also considers a hotel’s food and drinks offering, as in recent years Australian hotels have become a destination for dining as well as sleeping.

“Gold Coast [QT] is different from the music in Sydney and it’s different from the music in Perth and so on,” says Lewis. “Gold Coast is kind of beachy and laidback, so there’s big tunes in there. Sydney is more hustle bustle, so there’s a little bit more up-tempo music.”

Lewis was responsible for the music at Santini Bar and Grill at QT Perth, working with former executive chef Nic Wood and New York-based Australian restaurateur Robert Marchetti. “We went with the Italian crooners and this old school sexy steakhouse vibe and it works really well,” Lewis says of the bold dining room. “It could come off really cheesy and weird but the fact that it’s over styled, the music can kind of be a little cheesy.”

Lewis creates music schedules. Typically breakfast music will take guests from 6am until noon, then there’s noon until 3pm, and so on. “I break the music up into tempos,” he says. “I’ll break it up into 100 beats per minute and under, then keep that from about 5pm to 6 or 7pm, and then increase the tempo as the night goes on.”

The ultimate in background soundtracks is perhaps elevator music. And Lewis’s sound design at QT Sydney and Melbourne extends to these brief interludes between floors, with sensors in the ceilings changing the music according to the number of people riding. “With one person we might play All by Myself, with two it would be something like Just The Two of Us, and then party tunes after that.”