Seventeen percent of people, in a recent Mori poll, regard piped music as "the thing they most detest about modern life" (34% of people hated piped music, only 30% like it, 36% are indifferent). A survey by Gatwick airport in 1994 showed that 43% of its respondents disliked its piped music; only 34% liked it and the rest were indifferent.
Ordinary daily life has never been noisier. It has become increasingly allowable for one person with a radio or a car-installed speaker to trespass on the peace and quiet of other people. And it has become "cool" to play muzak in a reception room, a bus, or a taxi. Muzak is now commonly piped onto streets, beaches and parks in numerous countries, and is found in hotels, pubs, restaurants, GP and hospital waiting areas, and on hospital wards.
Many people in hospital are helpless and immobile. However, nothing in the Patient's Charter protects their right to silence when they are in this vulnerable state. If we passively accept this piped music will spread “like an insidious cancer” (Julian Lloyd Webber) further and further. We have a right to silence.
Now go to the orientation page. You might also like to explore the directory of pubs, hotels and restaurants without piped music in the UK. Or you might want to think about the culture of dumbing down we increasingly inhabit.
Please use the forum on this site for a lively exchange of views and information with other site visitors. The link to the Forum is towards the bottom of the page.
Take a look at, and use, the Customer Complaint Forms, on the Complain page. Also look at the list of tactics on the Complain page
Join the Nomuzak Yahoo Group (link just below) for information, news, ideas and views
The irony is that it is our development as a civilization--pushing for more and more technological progress and urban expansion--that has created our current frazzled mental state. This is distended-intellectualism. The eminent historian Will Durant once observed that "no man who is in a hurry is quite civilized." We are also assaulted by continual urban din: the traffic rumble, emergency vehicles, animals screeching and barking, doors and trash cans slamming, trains and planes, babble of our radio and TV sets,
jangling of our telephones and alarm systems, whirring of our computers and air-conditioning units, lawnmowers and power tools, supermarket background music and pervasive rock and rap, the jackhammer and piledriver celebrating new construction projects. The ubiquitous cacophony surrounds us day and night. Our noise pollution adds to the sense of urgency--reinforcing the breakdown between our inner nature and our technological environment. Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Donald N. Wood
This site provides information about shops, companies and public services using piped music (aural pollution) in the spaces occupied by their clients or customers and it encourages you to complain about this abuse. There is also a directory of pubs, cafes, restaurants and hotels that do not use muzak, and you are encouraged to add to this information. There is an associated section on the dumbing down of British culture - the link to the increasing use of muzak is obvious and needs no explanation.
