Get Ready For Every Bar You Visit To Play Its Music At Ear-Bending Volumes

noah | July 21, 2008 10:00 am
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Another new study with dubious claims has reached the newswires, and it’s probably going to make nights at your local a little more screamy in the short term: Researchers in France have decided that playing “environmental music” in a bar, and playing it loudly, results in consumption rates of alcohol going up, up, up. That’s right, it’s just the power of the music’s volume that makes people head back to the bar for another order. Crazy, right? Well, viewing the methodology of the study, one might think a more appropriate headline for it would be “BREAKING: Young Men Are Likely To Drink Faster After Being In A Bar For A Long Time On A Saturday Night.” The icy cool numbers after the jump.

To gauge the effect of sound levels on drinking, the team spent three Saturday nights visiting two bars, where they observed 40 men aged between 18 and 25 drinking beer.

“We have shown that environmental music played in a bar is associated with an increase in drinking,” Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioural sciences researcher at the University of Southern Brittany in France, who led the study, said in a statement.

With help from the bars’ owners, the team turned the music up and down and then recorded how much and how fast people drank. The men did not know they were being observed.

Louder music spurred more consumption, with the average number of drinks ordered by patrons rising to 3.4 drinks from 2.6 drinks, Gueguen found. The time taken to drink a beer fell to an average 11.45 minutes from 14.51 minutes.

What this “environmental music” was, exactly, isn’t specified by the newswires, although I’m going to guess that any songs with straightedge messages are far from these bars’ speakers. Also, has no one thought that the louder the music, the more parched the throat, thanks to the need to SCREAM EVERY PIECE OF CONVERSATION?

Loud music makes customers drink faster [Reuters] [Photo: AP]