In Pursuit of Silence (14 page)

Indeed, one of the only repeatedly validated effects of music on shoppers relates to tempo. A faster beat makes shoppers move more quickly, while a more leisurely tempo slows physical movement through a store. The principle is derived from the effects of military music on the speed of marching soldiers. Not only does the process of falling into step with a drumbeat make the pace of the marcher subject to manipulation and lead to general arousal; recent research has demonstrated that when people are
moving in synchrony
to a beat, their behavior is more compliant to the collective will.

Things were beginning to fall into place. Loud, strong, fast beats pump energy—and social conformity—into any number of environments.

One of the earliest newspaper mentions of Muzak is found
in a
New York Times
article
from January 1939
entitled “Pier Equipped for Music Night and Day to Make Longshoremen Work Happily.” The Isbrandtsen-Moller Company, an operator of cargo liners, decided that its workers on Pier 30 in Brooklyn would perform better “under the influence of sweet music.” Muzak, which began in 1934 with a technological innovation that enabled phonographs to be played over electric power lines, quickly morphed into an audio-entertainment service for hotels and restaurants. The possibility of streaming music into workplaces opened new horizons for company marketers. An executive with Muzak applauded the policy decision by Isbrandtsen-Moller, declaring that “a heavy bag of coffee would assume a new aura of romance in an atmosphere charged with ebullient melodies urging the workers on.” Muzak’s program department determined the precise content of the “musical reproducing system” that broadcast dinner-and-dance music to the stevedores, loaders, and other members of the pier office force. It knew “the psychological time for ‘lift’ music and other categories fit for a worker’s wandering emotions.”

Shortly after the practice was adopted, however, and despite reports by the vice president of Muzak and Mr. Isbrandtsen that all the longshoremen were euphoric, local union leaders decided that the real purpose of the program was to speed up the pace of workers. The union called a strike that killed the music in double-time.

A couple of years later, however, during World War II, the notion of
“riveting to rhythm”
gained traction across the nation. Westinghouse discovered the acoustical secret to raising energy levels at work by accident, when the manager of the company’s
Newark plant began playing records to test radio receivers. After the project was completed and the receivers were turned off on the plant floor, workers began complaining that they felt more fatigued than when listening to “I Do, Do You?” and “Let’s Get Away from It All,” and asked that the practice be reinstated. In response to lingering criticism by labor advocates, business leaders insisted that instead of “spurring a tired horse,” they were helping to end boredom. Music, they contended, was a healthy distraction, particularly popular tunes that hit a metronome count between sixty-five and ninety beats per minute. By 1941, William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, could say, “Music is the friend of labor—it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirits of the workers.”

Zagat, the restaurant-review company, reports that noise is consistently customers’
number-two complaint
nationwide, ahead of high prices and second only to poor service. In 2008, more than a third of New York City patrons cited noise as their foremost complaint, up from 2002, the first year for which data is available, when only 21 percent ranked noise at the top of their list of dining grievances. Ten years ago, the
San Francisco Chronicle
was the first newspaper to incorporate a noise-rating system into its restaurant reviews: one bell indicates a sound level of less than sixty-five decibels, and the scale ascends through another three bells to the category of “bomb,” representing eighty-plus decibels of din. Michael Bauer, the
Chronicle
’s senior food and wine writer, says that he may now have to institute
a “double
bomb” rating, and reports a sharp decline in the number of San Francisco restaurants rating less than four bells, equivalent to loud factory noise.

The first rigorous study
of the effects of fast music on the pace of dining was conducted in the mid-1980s. Customers exposed to slow music spent significantly longer at table: an average of 56 minutes as opposed to 45 minutes. Another study, performed around the same time
at Fairfield University
, demonstrated that people increased the speed of their chewing by almost a third when listening to faster, louder music, accelerating from 3.83 bites a minute to 4.4 bites a minute. Stoked with data of this nature, chain restaurants, such as
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Grill
, developed computerized sound systems that were preset to raise the tempo and volume of music at hours of the day when corporate wanted to turn tables. “A lot of the managers try to turn music down because they think it’s too loud for people eating,” said Don Blanton, who developed the system for the grill. “So we’ve put in an automated system.”

Loudness has been linked to a more profitable rate of food consumption more by intuitive association than because of hard evidence. (Indeed, one study indicated a decline in the amount of money spent at the tables that turned too quickly.) But when it comes to consumption of alcohol, the data confirms expectations. A study completed in the summer of 2008 in France by
researchers at the Université de Bretagne-Sud
found that when
music was played at 72 decibels, men consumed an average of 2.6 drinks at a rate of one drink per 14.51 minutes. When the sound level was cranked up to 88 decibels, the numbers spiked to an average of 3.4 drinks consumed every 11.47 minutes. Reasons for this acceleration may include an increase in ambient energy, the difficulty of talking—which makes it easier to just signal the bartender for a refill than to engage in conversation—and perhaps actual changes in brain chemistry.

It has already been proven that acoustic stimulation
heightens the effect of MDMA
, better known as Ecstasy, to a degree that influences the drug’s toxicity. Since most people are taking Ecstasy in environments where sound levels are rapturously elevated, this is a worrisome finding. Though the mechanism is not fully understood, a recent study by Italian medical researchers demonstrated that even low doses, which did not in themselves affect electrocortical parameters, when administered in conjunction with sound equivalent to a typical discotheque, spiked electrical activity in the brain sufficiently to produce what might be called a sizzle-and-fry effect. Furthermore, when animals in the experiment were drugged in silent environments, their brains reverted to normal levels of electrocortical activity within twenty-four hours. When loud sound was added to the mix it took a full five days for their heads to straighten out.

But there’s a larger point here: noise heightens other forms of stimulation, especially other forms of overstimulation. There’s also evidence that loud acoustics make us crave more overstimulation.
A group of men
presented with an array of foods balanced across a salty-sweet spectrum reported pleasure from the high-sugar flavors at far greater rates when listening to loud music
than when dining to a background of soft music. In other studies, researchers have shown that when people
eat potato chips
while wearing headphones that amplify the overall noise level of their crunching, they rate the chips as crispier, fresher—more desirable—than their counterparts chewing without an electronic sound boost.

So retailers turn up the volume to get people moving through the store and build in-store excitement. Restaurateurs crank up the sound to turn tables and build (literal) restaurant buzz. There was one other environment that came to mind when I thought of places that had been much quieter in the not-so-distant past—sports arenas. The modern-day gladiator is dependent on acoustical steroids.

In October 2008, Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium (nicknamed “Deaf Valley”) was touted in the
Athens Banner-Herald
as
“one of the loudest places
in the nation.” University of Georgia coach Mark Richt called the stadium “a place you can’t hear yourself think. A place that I can truthfully say is the loudest place I’ve ever been.” Meanwhile,
Sports Illustrated
put Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City at the head of its list as “Toughest Place to Play” for an opposing team—because of how loud the Chiefs fans get. Rod Smith of the Denver Broncos remarked that the first time he played at Arrowhead
“it scared the hell
out of me—and that was just the national anthem … I thought they
were going to attack us. I thought 70,000 people were about to come out of the stands and get us.” Crowd noise at Autzen Stadium in Eugene has
reached 127.2 decibels
, which would make the fans’ experience resemble that of roaring in concert with a Boeing 747.

Qwest Field in Seattle, built in 2002, claims the title of
loudest roofed stadium
in the NFL. Paul Allen, owner of the Seattle Seahawks, instructed the architects to design the stadium to reflect a maximum of crowd noise back onto the field. He also installed a special seating zone with metal bleachers for the most raucous fans called the Hawk’s Nest, which would enable the stamping of feet to reverberate as violently as possible. When the Giants played at Qwest Field in 2005, they were called for
eleven false-start
penalties—attributed to crowd noise that made it impossible for them to communicate.

It’s small wonder that supporters of different teams are constantly accusing opposing home teams of electronically boosting the sound of their fans. Mike Sellers of the Washington Redskins recently said of Qwest Field,
“That place had to be miked up
, because the last time we played there, it was ridiculous. We couldn’t hear ourselves talk. For a stadium that small, it can’t be that loud.” Fred Micera, the Qwest Field audio engineer, pronounced Sellers’s charge an insult to the Seahawks fans, saying they had no need of artificial enhancement. (It can be done, though: a few years ago the New Jersey Nets were found to have been amplifying the sound of a crowd by broadcasting the prerecorded noise from another game.)

Outside of electronic escalation, there are structural tricks for maximizing the levels of ambient noise. Open-air stadium
architects will sometimes add extra balconies and increase balcony overhang to heighten the reflection of sound into the stands and onto the field. Different materials can be used in construction to maximize reverberation. And yet, as Jack Wrightson, president of WJHW, an acoustical-design firm responsible for many of the best-known stadiums in the United States, told me,
“The building doesn’t make
the crowd. You can enhance, but you can’t turn a bad crowd into a good one with just building materials.” The classic example, Wrightson said, is Denver’s Mile High Stadium where, in 2000, Bronco fans entered the
Guinness World Records
for the loudest single crowd roar ever recorded. At one point the NFL began penalizing home teams when the noise went above a certain decibel level that was deemed an interference with quarterbacks barking commands to their lineup. (Wrightson pointed out that the NFL crowd-noise regulations are almost entirely ignored. “Nothing a crowd likes more than getting a penalty called on itself,” he said.) But there was nothing special about the Mile High Stadium from an architectural point of view, Wrightson went on. “It’s all about the crowd.”