Sentence examples for merely background from inspiring English sources

They became merely background to the emphatic, busy, thoughtful but ultimately unfocused music.

I recognize all of the above as merely background noise, the wallpaper of our culture.

But how much of this is internal party politics that is merely background noise to the rest of voting America?

For him an opera's setting was not merely background but the defining element of its musical and dramatic nature.

A spokesman for the accounting trade group said the alert was merely background information provided to its members who are active in legislative issues.

And for all of the news about the Libor scandal, an attendee at the reception said that the controversy was merely "background noise" for those in the ornate ballroom — replete with crystal chandeliers and gold paneling and filigree.

Is the distinction between real causes and mere background conditions merely an arbitrary and unsystematic affair?

But these topics were merely the background for Ulitskaya's study of her characters' small lives.

"When people wrote about that time," she explained in Slipstream, "it was largely in terms of the battles fought; family life was merely a background.

It's remarkable that Godard doesn't find it worth mentioning — as if Daudet's views are merely the background music of European ideology, a droning and overfamiliar constant.

Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun, which existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now also the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom.