Today I was sitting in a waiting room. Everything was blending into mindlessness when I realized I was getting really irritated. It took me a minute to realize that the source of my irritation was the canned music being piped into the room. So I went outside and was greeted by "Bad Moon Rising" drifting across the parking lot from a car dealership.
This got me thinking, every where we go is music. All sorts of music, rock, adult, punk, 60's, bee-bop. Occasionally we are someplace where they are piping in the news or talk radio. Even my office cafeteria has a TV that is perpetually tuned to Fox News.
I remember a time in my life when I could sit down at an establishment and not have my auditory canal bombarded by something. Or is that just my imagination? Have I always been forced to listen to canned noise and I have just forgotten because it is so ubiquitious?
Why do public areas do this? Is there some marketing strategy behind forcing people to listen to Micheal Bolton, The Rolling Stones and crew. Does it increase sales or does it reduce lingering?
I know that when I go to a coffee shop, such as Starbucks, I refuse to sit inside if the music is more than a whisper. I would rather sit in my car with the windows up than be subjugated to their idea of music - whether I agree it's music or not.
And some of us can't sit in a quiet car anymore, or in a quiet house. Now we have to buy "White Noise" machines that pump in static or surf or rain sounds. My wife even bought an iPhone app that plays a sound the programers claim sounds like an A/C window unit, and she listens to it when she goes to bed.
Is that necessity or conditioning, that even in our sleep we need some sort of noise to beat a rhythm on our ear drum...
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