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Whatever happened to conversation over a coffee? At some cafes it’s become impossible, so earsplittingly loud is the music they play. Photo: Getty Images
Opinion
Stephen McCarty
Stephen McCarty

Coffee + cacophony: why is the music so deafeningly loud at some cafes and restaurants, whether for breakfast, lunch or dinner?

  • Some cafes, bars and restaurants seem to think playing music loud enough to melt your brain is good for business. Worst of all, some of it is rap music
  • Apparently it’s backed up by science – the faster and louder the music is, the quicker customers consume food and drink. This writer’s not buying it
Stephen McCarty
Stephen McCarty
Why you can trust SCMP

It’s not funny how stopping for breakfast at a coffee bar can be the equivalent of a trip to the dentist’s chair. Not because you’ve broken a tooth on your double hummus coconut tzatziki spinach crunch wrap, but because your fillings have been rattled out by the piledriving soundtrack to the obligation to consume food.

How is it that eateries of all descriptions can be so brain-meltingly LOUD!? Is there a decree mandating that in certain establishments the coexistence of conversation and dining is forbidden? Is there a further rule that the thump-thump-thumping rhythm of all chew-chew-chewing activities should follow the beat of that brand of aural vandalism so widely mistaken for music: rap?

Perhaps these purveyors of comestibles have been brainwashed into believing that offensive lyrics at bunker-buster-bomb detonation volume are a natural accompaniment to mastication. The coffee bar in which this correspondent’s ears were recently nailed to a wall was in New York, but the same sonic assault and battery could have been perpetrated in a certain, expensive Vietnamese restaurant in Hong Kong, a cafe in London or a souvlaki joint in Sydney.

Not only has the “slow food movement” not caught on worldwide, but it seems to be on fast forward, turned up to 11.

There’s nothing like having a relaxing coffee, but this is becoming more and difficult to enjoy. Photo: Getty Images
Surprisingly, however, as with the crafty placement of chocolate bars and other impulse-buy goods close to supermarket checkouts, there is some science behind the philistinism.

Studies have shown that loud music draws people in: believe it or not, it’s a case of “the louder the better” for proprietors, because eardrum-damaging restaurants are actually perceived to be “happening”. (I’d argue that anyone who subscribes to this notion has already been lobotomised at some previous juncture, but that’s for another Rant.) No one, it is claimed, wants to walk into a quiet restaurant. No one, clearly, asked my opinion on that point.

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Then there’s the idea of “eating to the beat” to consider. Yet more studies claim that the faster and louder the music (or rap) in an eatery, the more speedily customers consume food and drink – and that by becoming accustomed to the racket going on around them, rather than bailing out before their ears bleed, those customers, bafflingly, remain exactly where they are and spend money increasingly quickly. (This makes for an intriguing counterpoint to those investigations showing that fast-food-joint, floor-affixed furniture is designed to be so uncomfortable as to move on eat-in punters as quickly as possible.)

Half a block down from that New York coffee bar was what looked like, by 7.30pm nightly, a disco in full party mode: pulsing red lights, music that made the windows quiver. Turned out, it was a sushi bar. They must have been dancing to Rock Lobster.

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