Hi Gavin,
My first thought is to remove the background music from the MP4s entirely, and instead create a master that has an Audio object that contains the background music and have it loop. Then you can put the controls for the background music (either a Player Bar object and link it to that audio, or your own buttons that simply toggle that audio on and off [play/pause]). See image.
This also means that your background audio will play throughout the lesson (on any pages that have this Master), and even between page loads!
Hope that helps!