On the issue of loud music and pubs
Posted in Commentary on March 15th, 2005 by Sacha PeterRichard recently wondered about one of my interests on my about page. Specifically, it was about having an interest of “Conversation with people in small groups (or one on one) in quiet places.“
The ‘small group’ issue is important because when you are dealing with a larger group, people tend to cluster within the people that they know, which makes a large group environment a terrible way of getting to know other people. At a restaurant, this is impossible because of the seating arrangements. In free-standing environments, you literally have to ‘isolate and conquer’ in order to make progress. Isolation involves wrenching a hapless victim out of their ‘comfort group’. After you’ve accomplished this, when you get to the ‘conquer’ stage, it appears to be contrived (“Hi, who are you, what do you do, etc.”) and goes nowhere since there is absolutely zero depth you can cover in the 30 second window of opportunity before social awkwardness kicks in. For an introvert, this is something that takes an exhausting amount of social effort to pull off successfully. It’s also impossible if both people involved are introverted. So it’s critical that the groups involved be small, or preferably one-on-one.
As for the ‘quiet places’, I absolutely hate loud music food establishments. My auditory senses are not good at separating voice and music, so when I try having conversations with people, I notice my acuity is less than those around me. The people around me open their mouths and I manage to catch 50% of what they are saying, but this means that I have a lot of error-prone linguistic interpolation to perform. What’s even more frustrating is that other people tend to have no difficulty hearing each other (maybe the listener isn’t hearing anything either, but is too polite to understand and just says ‘yes’ to everything the speaker says). I was really concerned at my relative hearing capabilities, and I tested my hearing, but I’m fine at least in terms of the frequency range I can listen to.
I did some more thinking and asked myself how people can actually listen to each other in such environments? They have to get closer to each other. My theory is that these establishments keep the music loud because for men to talk to women they have to get closer to each other’s faces. This increases the chances of attraction (pheromones and stuff like that in action), which is probably why these establishments exist in the first place.
Maybe there is some science at work with this. But as long as the music is going at 110 decibels, I don’t want to be there since I prefer hearing what the other party has to say, instead of pretending I do.